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.
Scientists analyze the habitat temperature thresholds for modern plants, trees, insects, mammals, etc., and compare these values to the climate conditions these same species were living in according to the paleoclimate fossil record to determine how much warmer (or colder) the past was relative to the present.
Evidence of abundant lakes and ponds and the remains of vascular plants, warmth-demanding beetles, sponges, spruce forests…in a newly-discovered organic-rich deposit 480 m above sea level in High Arctic (76.4°N) northwest Greenland indicates the local climate was similar to that of today’s southern Greenland (~60°N) and North America during the Early Pleistocene ice age.
Scientists analyze the habitat temperature thresholds for modern plants, trees, insects, mammals, etc., and compare these values to the climate conditions these same species were living in according to the paleoclimate fossil record to determine how much warmer (or colder) the past was relative to the present.
About 2 million years ago (Early Pleistocene), CO2 levels were estimated to have hovered around 300 ppm.
A glacier site in northwest Greenland, Pingorsuit, sits 480 m above sea level. It is currently covered in “continuous permafrost” that is still 25 cm thick in July (Bennike et al., 2023). Modern mean July temperatures only reach 1-2°C here.
Organic deposits discovered at this site in 2019 reveal the climate was much warmer than today during the Early Pleistocene. Picea mariana (spruce) existed at this High Arctic location at that time, but the growth limit latitude for P. mariana today is only the southern tip of Greenland and North America.
The Early Pleistocene presence of several varieties of vascular plants at Pingorsuit further suggests the site had a sub-Arctic or boreal climate that needed have averaged 10°C or warmer during July, or “at least 9°C higher than at present.”
“At the Pingorsuit Glacier in North-West Greenland, an organic-rich deposit was discovered at an elevation of 480 m above sea level. The sediments contained remains of vascular plants, mosses, beetles, caddisflies, midges, bryozoans, sponges and other invertebrates. The fossils were deposited in a boreal environment with a mean July air temperature that was at least 9 °C higher than at present.”
The Beaver Pond site at 78°N was so warm and permafrost-free during the mid-Pliocene (~3-4 million years ago) that it could accommodate grass-grazing megafauna such as horse and deer. Even camels lived in the High Arctic at this time.
There appears to be no evidence supporting the claim that the High Arctic modern climate is unusually warm relative to the past, or when there were allegedly much lower CO2 ppm values.
Fourteen years ago, a new climate myth was born. A grand solar minimum (GSM) was in the making that would not only reverse global warming but plunge the planet into a new Little Ice Age, surprising the warming alarmists and causing undue suffering. The time has come to bury that myth.
1. The origin of the myth
The deep solar minimum of 2008-2009 was a complete surprise to solar physicists. They did not know that solar activity could become so low because it had not occurred during the time of solar observations with modern instrumentation. In 2009, a solar scientist named Habibullo Abdussamatov published a paper in Russian in which he argued that the following years would see a major cooling based on the onset of a new GSM. His evidence was
The low solar activity of the then ongoing solar cycle (SC) minimum 23-24.
A bicentennial cycle in solar activity that supposedly decreased solar activity after 1600 and after 1800
The pause in global warming since 1998
Figure 1. From Abdussamatov 2009. “The Sun defines the climate”. Nauka i Zhizn, N1, pp. 34-42.
This prediction reached the West and became very popular, like any catastrophic prediction, actually. Articles about the arrival of a GSM proliferated on climate blogs, such as the one on WUWT: The ‘Baby Grand’ has arrived.
Other scientists, such as Livingston & Penn and de Jager & Duhau, joined Abdussamatov in 2009 in proposing the arrival of a GSM, though being more cautious about its climatic effects. It went so far as to threaten the global warming narrative at a time under assault from the Pause and Climategate. Thus, none other than Stefan Rahmstorf came to their defense saying that according to the models
“a new Maunder-type solar activity minimum cannot compensate for global warming caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.”(Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010)
2. 2012-2015, the myth’s golden years
After 2009 solar activity was slowly increasing, and it was clear that SC24 was a cycle the likes of which had not been seen in nearly a century. Many scientists were writing papers on an SGM, which had gone from hypothesis to serious possibility. Abdussamatov published new papers in English in 2012 and 2013.
In 2011, Swedish sea level expert Nils-Axel Mörner published an article in one of the few journals still accepting skeptical contributions, Energy & Environment. He began with a bold statement:
“Around 2040-2050 we will be at a new major Solar Minimum. A new ‘Little Ice Age’ in the Arctic and northwestern Europe can be expected then,”Nils-Axel Mörner, 2011
a claim for which he provided no evidence other than an extension of solar activity based on the sunspot record.
Two years later, Nils-Axel got 18 other researchers to participate in the first issue of a newly created journal, Pattern Recognition in Physics. It was a special issue on how the orbits of the planets might cause solar variations. It included a letter signed by the 19 researchers that constituted a frontal attack on the IPCC conclusions. Among the signatories were well-known researchers such as Willie Soon, Nicola Scafetta, Ole Humlum, David Archibald, Harald Yndestad, and Don Easterbrook, as well as some people active on the Internet, such as Tallbloke. The predictable result was the cancellation of the magazine by its publishers. The letter ended with a conclusion and two implications agreed upon by the signatories. The second implication is relevant here:
“Obviously, we are on the way to a new grand solar minimum. This casts serious doubt on the question of continued, even accelerated, warming as claimed by the IPCC project.”
By then, lots of articles were being published about the coming GSM and its possible effect on climate (de Jager & Duhau 2012; Solheim et al. 2012; Anet et al. 2013; Steinhilber & Beer 2013). Multiple articles on the Internet made the myth very popular among climate skeptics and alarmists, attracted by the catastrophic nature of a new ice age.
3. Valentina Zharkova’s stardom.
It was in July 2015 when the myth jumped into newspapers around the world. A Northumbria University researcher, Valentina Zharkova, presented her solar model at a meeting, and the news release highlighted that it predicted a “60% drop in solar activity in the 2030s, to ‘mini ice age’ levels.”
The climate connection was not made by her, it was made by those who wrote the press release. Her paper (Zharkova et al. 2015), published that same year, included nothing about climate. She herself said:
“In the press release, we didn’t say anything about climate change. My guess is that when they heard about the Maunder minimum, they used Wikipedia or something like that to find out more about it.”Valentina Zharkova
Her research was linked to climate change and the Little Ice Age only after the media coverage. However, she said that it made sense to her once the connection was made. She liked the attention. To this day, she continues to link her research on solar activity to climate effects. In a 2020 editorial for the journal Temperature (Zharkova 2020), she writes:
“This, in turn, can result in a decrease in Earth temperature of up to 1.0°C relative to the current temperature over the next three cycles (25-27) of grand minimum 1. The largest temperature drops will [occur] during the local minima between cycles 25-26 and 26-27.”Zharkova, 2020
Irina Kitiashvili, a NASA researcher, also has a model that predicts SC25 will have about half the activity of SC24 (Kitiashvili 2020). The problem with the Kitiashvili and Zharkova models is that they are a complex linear extrapolation of the decreasing solar activity since SC21 in 1980.
4. 2018 turns the tables
A paper by Zharkova’s group in 2018 (Popova et al. 2018) pushed their model back 800 years and was harshly criticized by prominent Finnish solar researcher Ilya Usoskin (Usoskin 2018). He was a reviewer for the paper but his review was lost through the publisher’s system and subsequently published as a commentary. Usoskin stated with good reason that:
“it is impossible to make harmonic predictions for thousands of years based on only 35 years of data,”Usoskin, 2018
and that the model output was contradicted by observations.
Figure 2 is a figure from Zharkova et al. 2015 with my annotations in red.
While the Maunder Minimum is where it should be, the Spörer Minimum, the largest GSM in thousands of years is missing in action, instead, she misleadingly labeled the period 1350-1500 as the Medieval Warm Period which took place at least 300 years earlier. Zharkova had joined the ranks of climate scientists willing to misrepresent the data to further their careers. Zharkova’s model is not worth the computer time it consumes. This is a sad reality for so many models today.
In 2018 the new solar minimum was arriving, and climate blogs published numerous articles about a coming GSM. A solar minimum is also the time when the solar polar fields reach their 11-year maximum values, which allows us to predict the strength of the coming cycle using the polar field precursor method. At a meeting in 2018, Leif Svalgaard made public his prediction that SC25 should have slightly more activity than SC24, not less.
5. January 2023 already has as much activity as February 2014.
February 2014 was the most active month in SC24, with 146.1 sunspots, and 166.2 solar flux units (sfu) in the 10.7 cm radio band, the other way to measure solar activity. January 2023 had 143.6 sunspots and 176.6 sfu, matching the activity of the most active month in SC24 (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Solar activity as measured by monthly sunspot number (left, black) and 10.7 cm solar flux (right, red), between 1975 and January 2023.
The smoothed sunspot number used by SILSO to determine solar cycle onset, solar cycle end, and solar cycle maximum is delayed by 6 months due to smoothing. However, it consistently shows that SC25 is slightly more active than SC24 at the same distance from the minimum.
Figure 4. Using SILSO’s smoothed sunspot number SC25 shows slightly more activity than SC24. Source: Jan Alvestad
There is a long time left until SC25 ends, predictably around 2031-32, but it is no longer defensible to claim that SC25 will be much less active than SC24. Therefore, fears that a GSM will develop during the next solar cycles should end.
6. Solar spectral analysis knew it since 2006
Before this whole story started, before the polar field precursor method had a prediction for SC24, before anyone knew that a decline in solar activity was coming, in 2006 Mark Clilverd, along with other British and Finnish researchers, published a paper entitled “Predicting solar cycle 24 and beyond” (Clilverd et al. 2006). In this remarkable paper, they used a spectral method based on secular cycles in sunspot numbers to predict that cycles SC24 and 25 would have much lower activity than previous cycles, but would be followed by SC26 when activity would begin to recover (Figure 5).
Figure 5. Clilverd’s model predicted two cycles of low activity long before they happened.
Being the first to predict the current extended solar minimum as the expansion of only two cycles and giving the correct dates, it is only fair that this extended solar minimum is called the Clilverd Minimum.
I also did a simple spectral model of past and future solar activity in 2016, which I posted in a commentary on WUWT. The model was refined in 2018 for my book and appears in Chapter 13 (21st Century Climate Change). The variable modeled is the total number of monthly spots in a cycle from start to finish, since the maximum activity is a less reliable variable. It cannot predict the length of a cycle, so it assumes 11-year cycles (Figure 6). If a solar cycle is not precisely 11 years long, the shape of the cycle will be affected, but the overall solar activity should not be affected.
Figure 6. Spectral model of solar activity showing the centennial Feynman cycle (F1-F4) and predicting solar activity until 2130. Figure from Vinós 2022.
This model also predicted in 2016 that no GSMs should occur in the 21st century. In fact, it may be two to three centuries before humans experience a GSM again. Not a bad outcome if it turns out to be correct, as GSM have a very strong negative climatic effect (Vinós 2022).
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 video falsely 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 I 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.
Atmospheric rivers are a natural part of the West coast’s climate, and neither historic data, nor recent trend data, indicate that the frequency or severity of those events are increasing.
A recent article at Phys.org, originally published by the Chicago Tribune, says that climate change is behind the recent atmospheric river events in California, as well as an alleged increase in Category 4 and 5 hurricanes. This is false.
Atmospheric rivers are a natural part of the West coast’s climate, and neither historic data, nor recent trend data, indicate that the frequency or severity of those events are increasing. Likewise, there has been no increase in major hurricanes over the past hundred years of global warming.
In “Climate change is fueling extreme weather. How do we make a difference?,” writer Barbara Willard makes several false claims regarding climate change and extreme weather, the most immediately egregious being that recent atmospheric rivers are being fueled by climate change, and that deadly hurricanes are becoming more common. Single weather events, or even seasons of bad weather, can’t be used to measure climate change, which is measured as at least a 30-year trend of regional weather.
Willard gives credit to “extreme event attribution” science by the National Academy of Sciences for promoting the narrative that weather is worsened by climate change, but she misses the reason why this is a poor scientific standard. Attribution scientists begin with the assumption that carbon dioxide has a significant impact on climate, and that the modest warming of the past hundred-plus years is fueling, at least in part, extreme weather. It is an paradigm example of confirmation bias. They run multiple computer models, some that are fictional recreations of what they assume the climate might like be if humans didn’t exist on the planet, and some scenarios including humans but based on flawed emissions and temperature assumptions.
The misleading nature of attribution science has been pointed out multiple times at Climate Realism, for example, here, here, and here, as the accuracy of a computer models are only as accurate as the input of data and the assumptions concerning interactions and feedback mechanisms built into the models. None of these models have been confirmed to accurately portray recorded climate conditions. Since we can’t tap into a parallel universe where a storm was more or less extreme, there is inherent uncertainty, that makes these kinds of computer models interesting from a theoretical perspective, but not much more.
Real world weather data is available and improving, so the prognostications of attribution modelers can be checked over time. So far, when actual data is compared to computer models projections, the evidence undermines the “climate catastrophe” theory.
Regarding atmospheric rivers, Willard says climate change “fueled” the recent “precipitation episodes” in California. However, even scientists and publications who normally support alarmist messaging have admitted that recent California weather is not historically unusual. A senior hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Los Angeles told a Los Angeles Times writer that the recent atmospheric river events were “nothing as big as what we’ve gone through before.”
Indeed, there is a long history, both recorded by humans and indicated by paleontological proxy data, of major swings between drought and deluge in California. Willard writes that there is “broad scientific consensus that climate change increases water vapor in the atmosphere,” but recent studies have found no evidence of this occurring in the regions where west coast atmospheric rivers originate.
As for hurricanes, Willard’s claims are easily refuted with the most recent hurricane data. Major hurricanes, or those ranked as a Category 3 and above, have seen no increase over the past decades, and the past year has seen some of the lowest major hurricane counts since the 1980s. (See figure below)
As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the IPCC claims only low confidence “for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” As recently as 2017 saw the end of the longest period without a major hurricane landfall in the United States in recorded history, a nearly 12-year period with no major hurricanes. The gap is seen in the figure below, showing major landfalling hurricanes in the United States through 2020.
Figure 2: Number of continental United States landfalling hurricanes 1900–2019. Left, all hurricanes, right, major hurricanes (category 3 and above), with (insignificant) regression lines, (Klotzbach et al., 2018), with 2018–20 updated from personal communication by Anthony Watts with lead authors.
2022 ended with the weakest storm levels in 42 years, despite predictions of an extreme hurricane season early on, as discussed in detail, here.
Willard ends the article with a call to climate action, including personal lifestyle changes like vegetarianism and traveling less, as well as political lobbying and proselytizing to your community. What she neglected, however, is looking into weather data and fact-checking political sources of climate alarm. When even the most basic research is conducted, climate change ceases to look so catastrophic.
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.”
The demand for highly paid ESG nannycrats to enforce nonsensical rules is on the rise. This will cause a rippling impact of higher inflation everywhere.
The demand for highly paid ESG nannycrats to enforce nonsensical rules is on the rise. This will cause a rippling impact of higher inflation everywhere.
Impending regulations in the European Union, which is at the forefront on ESG legislation, will soon require tens of thousands of suppliers across the supply chain in Asia to report their ESG performance, said Amfori president Linda Kromjong.
“If you don’t start preparing now, you will be late if and when the legislation kicks in,” she told the Post.
The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, due to be rolled out next year, will require companies to disclose how sustainability issues, such as climate change, impact their business and how their operations in turn affect people and the planet.
Some 50,000 companies – all large companies and listed small and medium-sized firms – will have to make such disclosures, up from 11,700 large companies and public entities with more than 500 employees mandated under existing legislation. Auditing of the disclosures will be mandatory.
These companies will in turn require their global suppliers to disclose their sustainability data, such as greenhouse-gas emissions, so that they can calculate their own environmental footprints and social risk exposure.
The European Parliament’s environment committee last Thursday backed tougher legislation that will force firms with over 250 staff and annual worldwide turnover of more than €40 million (US$42.8 million), to check and report whether their suppliers within and outside Europe use slave or child labour, or pollute the environment.
Escape From the Madness
‘There is no escape’ from impending European Union rules requiring sustainability reporting, Amfori president Linda Kromjong warns Asian suppliers
Also note that Brussels-based Amfori provides digital tools and training for suppliers to do self-assessments on ESG performance and compare themselves with industry benchmarks, based on international standards.
If you don’t think this madness is hugely inflationary, then you just are not thinking at all.
My Comment
Indeed, we can see where this is going. RegulationFare is like LawFare: The process is the punishment. Ronald Reagan’s observation comes to mind:
In the end, the state directs business to meet state objectives, either through ownership or through agency rules. That brings in the reality described by Trotsky:
Gabriella updates listeners on the latest updates on the proposed Lava Ridge Wind Project in southern Idaho and Senator Daines’ being temporarily banned–then reinstated
“Idahoans cherish the concept of multiple and mixed uses on their public lands. This requires conservation, predictability of use and, most importantly, support from the local communities. These deep-rooted values are compromised by a piecemeal approach to large-scale generation projects on public lands. Dedicating hundreds of square miles of public lands to a specific use will have a long-term effect on recreation, grazing, sporting uses and the land in general.”— Letter from Idaho Lawmakers opposing Lava Ridge- February 6th
In Episode 340 of District of Conservation, Gabriella updates listeners on the latest updates on the proposed Lava Ridge Wind Project in southern Idaho and Senator Daines’ being temporarily banned–then reinstated — on Twitter over his profile picture featuring a Pronghorn antelope harvest. Tune in!
In Episode 579 of District of Conservation, Gabriella discusses the permitting reform bill – aka BAAJA – that is gaining traction in Congress now. The Senate will hold a cloture vote starting at 3:30pm ET in a motion to proceed. Gabriella discusses the status quo without permitting reform, how BAAJA is good for the environment and affordability. Tune in!SHOW NOTESBipartisan Policy Center: BAAJA ExplainerEstimating the US Energy System Impacts of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act
Gabriella Hoffman is a Media Strategist and Award-Winning Outdoor Writer. She hosts the “District of Conservation” podcast and CFACT’s original YouTube series “Conservation Nation.” Learn more about her work at http://www.gabriellahoffman.com
The claims are absurd and this battery park will make next to no difference to how the grid operates, but will earn plenty of money paid out of our energy bills.
Sky News have fallen for the old battery storage trick again!
Sky News has been given exclusive access to Europe’s biggest transmission grid-linked battery which takes in the uneven power from wind turbines and smoothing it out for local homes and businesses.
It looks like a self-storage park: rows of shipping containers in a patch of Merseyside waste ground. But appearances can be deceptive as this is the first step in saving billions of pounds off bills and millions of tonnes of carbon. It’s a mega-battery.
Let’s take a step back. One of the great advantages of fossil fuels, and one we take largely for granted, is they are so easy to store. Piles of coal, drums of oil, tanks of gas. They just sit there waiting for a deliberate spark.
Renewables are different: you can’t hold the wind or bottle the sun. As the proportion of green power on our grid grows so does this inconvenient truth.
The variable and uncontrollable nature of solar and wind is not a new discovery, but it is only now that we are coming close to an affordable solution: massive banks of lithium-ion batteries similar to those in a laptop, phone and only affordable now thanks to their use in electric cars.
Sky News has been given exclusive access to Europe’s biggest transmission grid-linked battery just after switch-on. It covers an area of around two football pitches in nearly one hundred containers and can store as much electricity as 1,500 electric cars, taking in the uneven power from wind turbines and smoothing it out for local homes and businesses. If you didn’t do this, lights would dim, or wires could melt. Most of that job today is done by either firing up mini generators – so called gas-peakers – to fill the power troughs or turning turbines off to prevent surges.
James Basden, co-founder and director of Zenobe, says their batteries will cut carbon emissions.
“Battery storage sites like this are enabling more wind power to come on, but also it’s shutting down the gas generators that are currently operating and as a result we save huge amounts of CO2.”
Image: Zenobe’s grid-linked battery
But they should also cut bills too. When wind farms must turn off, they are paid to do this, paid to not generate. This is known as “curtailment” and the total cost is over half a billion pounds per year and rising as we have more renewables in the energy mix.
Zenobe and other big battery developers say if we can store it, we can use it and not pay to waste it.
“This is pushing power back onto the grid in a very consistent and predictable way… So sites like this are going to reduce the amount of curtailment. This site itself will save somewhere between 50 and £100m to consumers over the next 15 years.”
The claims are absurd and this battery park will make next to no difference to how the grid operates, but will earn plenty of money paid out of our energy bills.
For a start, it will not stop curtailment of wind power, as claimed, as this is always due to lack of transmission capacity, not excess supply.
But more importantly, the amount of energy it can store is infinitesimally small. They mention the equivalent of 1500 electric cars; at, say, 50 KWh each, that works out at 75 MWh.
On a typical winter day, the UK consumes about 1 TWh, which equal 1 MILLION MWh. And that equals 694 MWh per minute.
So Liverpool’s new battery would be able to keep us going for about 7 seconds!
Somehow I don’t think this battery park, or a thousand of them, will be of much help when the wind stops blowing.
Look at it another way.
A 1000 MW offshore wind farm would typically produce about 9600 MWh a day. If every wind farm was obliged to provide and pay for enough battery storage to cover two weeks of no output, it would need 134,400 MWh – or 1792 Liverpool battery parks.
So what is this battery park for?
The most it can do is to provide a tiny amount of help in managing frequency fluctuations, for which the National Grid will pay handsomely. In the past this would not have been necessary, because of the inertia provided by spinning generators.
But the main business case is to buy power in when it is cheap, and sell it when it is dear.
A return to typical Queensland summer conditions this month has seen large electricity consumers paid to use less and the electricity market operator (AEMO) scrambling to balance the grid and prevent blackouts.
‘Renewables are the cheapest form of new energy.’ – Chris Bowen
A return to typical Queensland summer conditions this month has seen large electricity consumers paid to use less and the electricity market operator (AEMO) scrambling to balance the grid and prevent blackouts.
Yet feckless politicians continue to erode the future prosperity of Australians by ensuring energy costs continue to increase; despite there being more raw energy in oil, coal, gas, and uranium available than ever before in human history.
We consumers are repeatedly told that wind and solar are ‘the cheapest form of new energy’, when in fact, the cost of electricity is increasing in parallel to the rise of renewables. ‘It’s all the fault of those dirty fossil fuels!’ some bottom feeders scream, when presented with this startling correlation.
If renewables are so abundant and cheap, why are renewables unable to halt, or even slow, the increase in our cost of electricity? One would expect a cheaper source to result in a cheaper product. Let’s look at the facts.
Wind and solar rarely set the wholesale price.
The highest-priced generator dispatched by the market operator sets a regional wholesale clearing price every five minutes.
Wind and solar – almost exclusively sold on long-term contracts at a fixed price – offer their output to the market at -$900-ish to ensure being dispatched, and very rarely set the wholesale price.
Coal, with the largest market share, sets the price most often and at relatively low price points. Gas and hydro set the price less often than coal, but at far higher prices.
Electricity bills are more than just the wholesale price.
As consumers we are a long way downstream from the generators – nobody has a cable straight into a power station. We are connected by a network of transformers, substations, transmission lines, more substations and transformers, distribution powerlines, pad mounts, poles and wires, underground cables, pits, pillars, meters, meter readers, and retailers. The income that pays for all these components to be built and maintained is sourced from our electricity bills.
The ACCC describes the average retail electricity bill as roughly 30 per cent wholesale and 70 per cent ‘the rest’.
Wind and solar can occasionally reduce the 30 per cent wholesale price, but can it reduce the remaining 70 per cent? The short answer is that it can’t. It actually increases it, pushing up the overall cost of supplying electricity.
Examples are easy to find. The federal government is at least doubling the cost of the transmission network. The Palaszczuk government promised $62 billion to close Queensland’s coal-fired power stations, with a good portion of that allocated to new transmission lines. Matt Kean promised the earth – or at least all the New South Wales land required to build new transmission for renewable energy zones – REZ. The Victorian government continues with reverse auctions and is reinstating the state-owned electricity bureaucracy. All this on top of billions spent on white elephant projects such as EnergyConnect (NSW to SA), MarinusLink (VIC to TAS), and HumeLink (Snowy 2 to NSW), that all must be recovered through electricity bills.
In addition to massive new spending on large projects, rooftop solar (heavily subsidised) adds ongoing costs to the large distribution networks in the form of managing excessive voltages, reverse power flows, and equipment upgrades. These costs have nothing to do with the cost of generation or wholesale price.
Renewable advocates slightly more evolved than the ‘fossil fuel screamers’ argue that wind and solar displace more expensive generation. They claim the merit order curve then causes cheaper generation to set the price more often, resulting in lower overall wholesale prices (note, the focus on wholesale prices and not actual bills).
Unfortunately, for those of us who pay an electricity bill from our meagre after-tax dollars, there are holes in this theory too.
Solar only works during the day, excluding the afternoon peak, and both wind and solar only work when the weather allows. Capacity factor of large-scale solar in Australia hovers around 25 per cent and wind at 30 per cent. That’s a lot of five-minute periods where wind and solar have no effect at all.
Intermittency and lack of inertia increases the cost of balancing grid frequency. More intermittency means more gaps needing to be filled by expensive gas and hydro.
Retailers hedge their wholesale purchases, accounting for price volatility while ensuring they have enough capacity to supply their customers. Hedging adds costs.
My criticisms of renewables and their life-support policies do not make me a fossil fuel shill with a desire to see the world burn. I just want to see Australians benefit from the lowest cost and highest security electricity system. That is the best outcome for us all.
The simple fact is wind and solar do not reduce the 30 per cent wholesale price component of the bill. Perversely, wind and solar increase the costs of the other 70 per cent. The combined effect of renewables is to increase the overall cost of electricity bills.
Over to you Mr Bowen.
Ben is an electrical engineer in the power and gas sector.
On 11th November 2011, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology replaced the probe in the automatic weather station measuring temperatures at the Alice Springs airport and the number of days with temperatures recorded above 40 degrees Celsius increased dramatically. This is likely to have everything to do with the change of equipment and nothing to do with the weather. To know this for certain, the bureau needs to make the parallel data for Alice Springs airport public, that is the daily temperature data recorded manually from a mercury thermometer at the same weather station from 21st March 1991 until at least 1 April 2019 (metadata here).
Alice Springs is close to the centre of Australia, and there are very few other weather stations in the region. Because the Bureau, and other IPCC-affiliated institutions, use a gridded method for calculating climate variability and change, and because weather stations are far and few between in the centre of Australia, temperatures as recorded at this station disproportionally affect not only the calculation of the average temperature for Australia, but also the global average temperature.
While Alice Springs is a globally important weather station, I doubt it is reliably recording temperatures.
I have explained in earlier posts within this series that the bureau uses a selection of different types of custom-designed probes and that it does not numerically average with the highest instantaneous spot readings becoming the maximum for that day. We also know that while there was a mercury thermometer also recording temperatures beside the probe in the Stevenson Screen in the Alice Springs weather station for at least 28 years, the bureau will not allow the 28-years of data from this mercury thermometer to be made public. The Bureau has denied every Freedom of Information request I have so far been a part of, and our most recent request is still under consideration (in mediation) with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Making this data public would be a quick way of confirming whether the probe in this automatic weather station is, or is not, reliably recording temperatures.
To be clear, since 1996 the Bureau has been transitioning from manual recordings of daily temperatures from liquid in glass thermometers (mercury for maximum temperatures and alcohol for minimum temperatures) to an automated system using probes, with the probes more responsive to fluctuations in temperatures and therefore likely to record both hotter and colder for the same weather – except the Bureau has placed limits on how cold temperatures can be recorded.
In the Bureau’s Research Report No. 032 ‘The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT)’ Version 2 (October 2018) Blair Trewin states:
In the absence of any other influences, an instrument with a faster response time will tend to record higher maximum and lower minimum temperatures than an instrument with a slower response time. This is most clearly manifested as an increase in the mean diurnal range. At most locations (particularly in arid regions), it will also result in a slight increase in mean temperatures, as short-term fluctuations of temperature are generally larger during the day than overnight.” (Page 21)
The limited parallel data that I have from the Bureau’s Mildura weather station shows that for the same weather the third probe installed at Mildura on 27th June 2012 often records 0.4 degrees Celsius warmer than the mercury thermometer during summer. I have also explained that on the very hottest days from June 2012 until January 2015 (the period of available parallel data) the observer did not enter a value from the mercury onto the A8 Form. I suspect because the discrepancy between the value from the probe and the mercury was so great, this data was denied – was never enter into the official record.
It is evident from calculations and charting by my friend and colleague Chris Gillham that after the new probe was installed at Alice Springs in November 2011 and compared with 2009-2010, there were 56 more days at or above 40 degrees Celsius (see chart that features at the top of this blog post).
What is now critical is for the bureau to make public the measurements from the mercury thermometer that has been recording temperatures in the same weather station at Alice Springs since 21st March 1991 through until at least April 2019. These 28 years of data would enable some comparison with temperatures from the new probe at Alice Springs that I hypothesis is hyping maximum temperatures and thus the global average temperature given the significance of Alice Springs to national and global temperature databases.
Mercury thermometers were used to measure official temperatures at Alice Springs until 1 November 1996.
According to the Bureau’s 2020 publication ‘An updated long-term homogenized daily temperature data set for Australia’, the Bureau tested one second variations within the minute at 6am and 3pm for replacement temperature probes at 98 official weather stations. The Bureau reports an average increase in 1-minute temperature variation of approximately 0.2 degrees relative to the previous probe at Alice Springs, while dismissing this as insignificant. The breakpoint is visible, and the comparison is only with the previous probe, giving no indication of the difference relative to a mercury thermometer or how this affects record hot days. To properly evaluate the effect of the replacement probes at all 98 official weather stations the available parallel data from mercury thermometers recording temperatures at the same weather stations needs to be made public as a matter of urgency.
According to the Bureau’s own analysis installation of the new probe at Alice Springs created a step-up in the average temperature variation relative to the previous probe. What needs to be made public is the daily parallel data so we know how much this probe records hotter relative to a mercury thermometer.
In the absence of access to the parallel data – and the absence of any quality assurance and credible research into issues arising from the transition to probes by the Bureau – no reliability can be placed on any claims by the Bureau and/or other scientists using their data, of record hot days, fewer extreme cold days or the claimed accelerated warming trend, or anything similar.
To be clear, we cannot know if the 1.5°C tipping point is imminent or if we have significantly more time. It could be the case that we have more time, if most of the probes at most of the 695 automatic weather stations spread across the landmass of Australia, like the probe currently recording at Mildura, are sometimes measuring up to 0.4°C hotter for the same weather.
The extent of any contrived warming is likely to vary with the type of custom-designed probe and the local environmental conditions. As Blair Trewin wrote in the Bureau’s 2018 report (page 21): in arid regions an electronic probe is likely to generate higher maximum. This hypothesis could be easily tested if the Bureau provided access, for example, to the 25 years of parallel data for the desert location of Giles.
Access to this data from Giles was requested under Freedom of Information by John Abbot on 9th November 2017, and denied by the Bureau on 14 November 2017.
*** The chart featuring at the top of this post was drawn by Chris Gillham as part of a series of reports that we are working on together, focusing not just on the change to probes in automatic weather stations but also the switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius and associated discontinuities in the historical temperature record.
Mixed messages from climate research here. In between evidence-free waffle about ‘potential’ human influence, they report that severe drought spells are nothing new in Europe, implying climate cycles of some sort. This means attribution of such drought to human causes is debatable, as the article admits.
Freighter passing a sandbank on the Rhine river [image credit: worldcargonews.com]
Mixed messages from climate research here. In between evidence-free waffle about ‘potential’ human influence, they report that severe drought spells are nothing new in Europe, implying climate cycles of some sort. This means attribution of such drought to human causes is debatable, as the article admits. – – – The 2015–2018 summer droughts have been exceptional in large parts of Western and Central Europe over the last 400 years, in terms of the magnitude of drought conditions.
This indicates an influence of man-made global warming, claims Phys.org.
However, multi-year droughts have occurred frequently in the 17th and 18th century, although not as severe.
This is the result of a new study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
It was conducted by a research team led by Mandy Freund from the University of Melbourne and Gerhard Helle from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences. They reconstructed European summer hydroclimate by analyzing the isotopic ratios of carbon (13C/12C) and oxygen (18O/16O) in tree-rings from a European network of forest sites.
It is the first spatial field reconstruction based on highly climate-sensitive tree-ring isotopes. This provides researchers with a unique tool for investigating climatic developments over the past centuries, both in a global overview and in a regionally differentiated manner.
European hydroclimate development
Recently, Europe has seen an increase in floods and droughts. These extreme events are part of the complex dynamics of European hydroclimate.
Obtaining a precise spatially-resolved picture of the dynamics in frequency and intensity of extremes at regional to local scale is a challenge, especially in the context of longer-term climatic variability.
Little is known about the long-term, spatiotemporal hydroclimatic variability across Europe due to the rather sparse availability of spatially explicit data series that properly reflect regional differences.
The European summer drought from 2015 to 2018 has particularly caused discussions about whether it falls within the normal range of climate fluctuations or is a result of anthropogenic warming.
New approach to reconstructing the hydro-climate of the last 400 years
To resolve this issue a spatially resolved reconstruction of European hydroclimate over the last 400 years was developed and published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
It is based on the analysis of stable carbon and oxygen isotopes, i.e. variants of these elements with different masses, in old tree stands from 26 forest sites across Europe.
Full article here. – – – Study: European tree-ring isotopes indicate unusual recent hydroclimate (2023) Quote: ‘We find three distinct phases of European hydroclimate variability as possible fingerprints of solar activity (coinciding with the Maunder Minimum and the end of the Little Ice Age) and pronounced decadal variability superimposed by a long-term drying trend from the mid-20th century.’
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