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.
In Episode 342 of District of Conservation, Gabriella interviews Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. Commissioner Buckingham is the 29th Texas Commissioner and first women to serve in this role.
“The good news is that we have very little federal land in Texas.
So the Feds haven’t been able to shut down oil and gas here like they have everywhere else in the country.
It’s why Texas, right now, is leading the nation in oil and gas production.
It really cannot be overstated how important energy independence is. And so many people don’t realize that oil and gas, I mean—it’s it’s the chair you’re sitting on; it’s the makeup you put on your face.
It’s a component of our everyday lives—not just energy. And we saw last last winter with the green New Deal policies in Europe, we had tankers of Texas—liquefied natural gas that already gone through the Panama Canal— and had to turn back around and go rescue Germany from all of their Green New Deal policies.
So it’s an important component for all of us, and we’re going to continue to fight that fight.” — TX Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham
In Episode 342 of District of Conservation, Gabriella interviews Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham. Commissioner Buckingham is the 29th Texas Commissioner and first women to serve in this role.
Here’s her biography: Commissioner Buckingham’s family were among the first settlers to Texas seven generations ago, and that tough, independent, pioneer spirit is deeply rooted in her personality.
True to her Texas roots, her commitment to service began early, serving as a volunteer firefighter, and attending the Texas A&M Fire School.
She is also an avid hunter, outdoorswoman, and steward of the land.
She made history in 2016 as the first woman elected to the Texas State Senate from Travis County.
Without slowing down, she made history again in 2022 when elected as the 29th, and state’s first female Commissioner of the General Land Office, Texas’ oldest state agency.
Dawn came from humble roots—growing up on a ranch near the Texas coast and then moved to Central Texas. She has never settled for less than her dreams. Wanting to attend college, but without the money to do so, Dawn lived at home, working two jobs to pay her own way through college at the University of Texas at Austin.
With endurance of spirit she graduated Magna Cum Laude and debt-free.
It was during college that she met the love of her life and husband of 31 years, Ed Buckingham. Dawn and Ed both received their medical degrees from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, and they have two children.
Dawn then went on to become a successful Oculoplastic Surgeon.
Her commitment to service and recognition for her work has allowed her to hold leadership positions in local, state, and national medical organizations.
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
It is Soooo easy to get things just a little bit off and miss reality. Especially in complex systems and even more so when folks raking in $Millions are interested in misleading for profit. Sigh.
E.M. Smith provides an helpful critique of a recent incomplete theory of earth’s climate functioning in his Chiefio blog post So Close–Missing Convection and Homeostasis. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
It is Soooo easy to get things just a little bit off and miss reality. Especially in complex systems and even more so when folks raking in $Millions are interested in misleading for profit. Sigh.
Sabine Hosenfelder does a wonderful series of videos ‘explaining’ all sorts of interesting things in and about actual science and how the universe works. She is quite smart and generally “knows her stuff”.But… It looks like she has gotten trapped into the Radiative Model of Globull Warming.
The whole mythology of Global Warming depends on having you NOT think about anything but radiative processes and physics. To trap you into the Radiative Model. But the Earth is more complex than that. Much more complex. Then there’s the fact that you DO have some essential Radiative Physics to deal with, so the bait is there. However…
It is absolutely essential to pay attention to convection in the lower atmosphere and to the “feedback loops” or homeostasis in the system.
The system acts to restore its original state. There is NO “runaway greenhouse” or we would have never evolved into being since the early earth had astoundingly high levels of CO2 and we would have baked to death before getting out of our slime beds as microbes.
Figure 16. The geological history of CO2 level and temperature proxy for the past 400 million years. CO2 levels now are ~ 400ppm. Source: Davis, W. J. (2017).
OK, I’ll show you her video. It is quite good even with the “swing and a miss” at the end. She does 3 levels of The Greenhouse Gas Mythology so you can see the process evolving from grammar school to high school to college level of mythology. But then she doesn’t quite make it to Post-Doc Reality.
Where’s she wrong? (Well, not really wrong, but lacking…)
I see 2 major issues. First off, she talks about the “lower atmosphere warming”. Well, yes and no. It doesn’t “warm” in the sense of getting hotter, but it does speed up convection to move the added heat flow.
In English “heating” has 2 different meanings. Increasing temperature. Increasing heat flow at a temperature.
We see this in “warm up the TV dinner in the microwave” meaning to heat it up from frozen to edible; and in the part where the frozen dinner is defrosting at a constant temperature as it absorbs heat but turns it into the heat of fusion of water. So you can “warm it up” by melting at a constant temperature of frozen water (but adding a LOT of thermal energy – “heat”) then later as increasing temperature once the ice is melted. It is very important to keep in mind that there are 2 kinds of “heating”. NOT just “increasing temperature”.
In the lower atmosphere, the CO2 window / Infrared Window is already firmly slammed shut. Sabine “gets that”. Yay! One BIG point for her! No amount of “greenhouse gas” is going to shut that IR window any more. As she points out, you get about 20 meters of transmission and then it is back to molecular vibrations (aka “heat”).
So what’s an atmosphere to do? It has heat to move! Well, it convects. It evaporates water.
Those 2 things dominate by orders of magnitude any sort of Radiative Model Physics. Yes, you have radiation of light bringing energy in, but then it goes into the ocean and into the dirt and the plants and even warms your skin on a sunny day. And it sits there. It does NOT re-radiate to any significant degree. Once “warmed” by absorption, heat trying to leave as IR hits a slammed shut window.
The hydrological cycle. Estimates of the observed main water reservoirs (black numbers in 10^3 km3 ) and the flow of moisture through the system (red numbers, in 10^3 km3 yr À1 ). Adjusted from Trenberth et al. [2007a] for the period 2002-2008 as in Trenberth et al. [2011].
So what does happen? Look around, what do you see? Clouds. Rain. Snow. (sleet hail fog etc. etc.)
Our planet is a Water Planet. It moves that energy (vibrations of atoms, NOT radiation) by having water evaporate into the atmosphere. (Yes, there are a few very dry deserts where you get some radiative effects and can get quite cold at night via radiation through very dry air, but our planet is 70% or so oceans, so those areas are minor side bars on the dominant processes). This water vapor makes the IR window even more closed (less distance to absorption). It isn’t CO2 that matters, it is the global water vapor.
What happens next?
Well, water holds a LOT of heat (vibration of atoms and NOT “temperature”) as the heat of vaporization. About 540 calories per gram (compared to 80 for melting “heat of fusion” and 1 for specific heat of a gram of water). Compare those numbers again. 1 for a gram of water. 80 for melting a gram of ice. 540 for evaporating a gram of water. It’s dramatically the case that evaporation of water matters a lot more than melting ice, and both of them make “warming water” look like an irrelevant thing.
Warming water is 1/80 as important as melting ice, and it is 1/540 th as important as evaporation of the surface of the water. Warming air is another order of magnitude less important to heat content.
So to have clue, one MUST look at the evaporation of water from the oceans as everything else is in the small change.
Look at any photo of the Earth from space. The Blue Marble covered in clouds. Water and clouds. The product of evaporation, convection, and condensation. Physical flows carrying all that heat (“vibration of atoms” and NOT temperature, remember). IF you add more heat energy, you can speed up the flows, but it will not cause a huge increase in temperature (and mostly none at all). It is mass flow that changes. The number of vibrating molecules at a temperature, not the temperature of each.
In the end, a lot of mass flow happens, lofting all that water vapor with all that heat of vaporization way up toward the Stratosphere. This is why we have a troposphere, a tropopause (where it runs out of steam… literally…) and a stratosphere.
What happens when it gets to the stratosphere boundary? Well, along the way that water vapor turns into water liquid very tiny drops (clouds) and eventually condenses to big drops of water (rain) and some of it even freezes (hail, snow, etc.). Now think about that for a minute. That’s 540 calories per gram of heat (molecular vibration NOT temperature, remember) being “dumped” way up high in the top of the troposphere as it condenses, and another 80 / gram if if freezes. 620 total. That’s just huge.
This is WHY we have a globe covered with rain, snow, hail, etc. etc. THAT is all that heat moving. NOT any IR Radiation from the surface. Let that sink in a minute. Fix it in your mind. WATER and ICE and Water Vapor are what moves the heat, not radiation. We ski on it, swim in it, have it water our crops and flood the land. That’s huge and it is ALL evidence of heat flows via heat of vaporization and fusion of water.
It is all those giga-tons of water cycling to snow, ice and rain, then falling back to be lofted again as evaporation in the next cycle. That’s what moves the heat to the stratosphere where CO2 then radiates it to space (after all, radiation toward the surface hits that closed IR window and stops.) At most, more CO2 can let the Stratosphere radiate (and “cool”) better. It can not make the Troposphere any less convective and non-radiative.
Then any more energy “trapped” at the surface would just run the mass transport water cycle faster. It would not increase the temperature.
More molecules would move, but at a limit on temperature. Homeostasis wins. We can see this already in the Sub-Tropics. As the seasons move to fall and winter, water flows slow dramatically. I have to water my Florida lawn and garden. As the seasons move to spring and summer, the mass flow picks up dramatically. Eventually reaching hurricane size. Dumping up to FEET of condensed water (that all started as warm water vapor evaporating from the ocean). It is presently headed for about 72 F today (and no rain). At the peak of hurricane season, we get to about 84 or 85 F ocean surface temperature as the water vapor cycle is running full blast and we get “frog strangler” levels of rain. That’s the difference. Slow water cycle or fast.
IF (and it is only an “if”, not a when) you could manage to increase the heat at the surface of the planet in, say, Alaska: At most you would get a bit more rain in summer, a bit more snow in winter, and MAYBE only a slight possible, of one or two days that are rain which could have been snow or sleet.
Then there’s the fact that natural cycles swamp all of that CO2 fantasy anyway. The Sun, as just one example, had a large change of IR / UV levels with both the Great Pacific Climate Shift (about 1975) and then back again in about 2000. Planetary tilt, wobble, eccentricity of the orbit and more put us in ice ages (as we ARE right now, but in an “interglacial” in this ice age… a nice period of warmth that WILL end) and pulls us out of them. Glacials and interglacials come and go on various cycles (100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 12,000 year interglacials – ours ending now, but slowly). The simple fact is that Nature Dominates, and we are just not relevant. To think we are is hubris of the highest order.
Figure 9: Two contrasting views of the effects of how the continuous intensification of deep cumulus convection would act to alter radiation flux to space. The top (bottom) diagram represents a net increase (decrease) in radiation to space
Footnote
There are two main reasons why investigators are skeptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarm. This post intends to be an antidote to myopic and lop-sided understandings of our climate system.
CO2 Alarm is Myopic: Claiming CO2 causes dangerous global warming is too simplistic. CO2 is but one factor among many other forces and processes interacting to make weather and climate.
Myopia is a failure of perception by focusing on one near thing to the exclusion of the other realities present, thus missing the big picture. For example: “Not seeing the forest for the trees.” AKA “tunnel vision.”
2. CO2 Alarm is Lopsided: CO2 forcing is too small to have the overblown effect claimed for it. Other factors are orders of magnitude larger than the potential of CO2 to influence the climate system.
Lop-sided refers to a failure in judging values, whereby someone lacking in sense of proportion, places great weight on a factor which actually has a minor influence compared to other forces. For example: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill.”
In that article, I outlined an approach that I used to tease out signs of acceleration in the rate of rise of sea level in the historical tidal gauge provided by the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level or PMSL (Holgate et al., 2013; PSMSL, 2022). The posting was inspired by the peer reviewed article Nerem et al. (2018), herein referred to as PNAS2018. In that article, the authors estimated the current rate of change of the rate of sea level rise (i.e., sea level acceleration) and they argued that the historical tidal gauge record was inadequate for measuring sea level acceleration of the past. I wanted to see what the tidal gauge record had to say about historical sea level rise acceleration.
Briefly, I explored many different avenues to calculate prior sea level rise acceleration to see if I could determine whether modern acceleration found in PNAS2018 was a novel and new phenomenon, or whether this sort of acceleration ebbed and flowed throughout the 20th century. I wound up picking a subset of data from the most complete tidal gauge records over the period from 1925 to 2015, a kind of top 100 sites on the “Tidal Gauge Hit Parade”. Using that subset, the best method that I found to combine acceleration signals, in a manner that did not produce artifacts caused by missing data points, was to first calculate an acceleration record for each site and then combine the acceleration data using an area-weighted average. See the previous post for details on the method used.
Since posting that article of WUWT, I realized that I could use a similar technique to cast a wider net and exploit data from a much larger subset of the 1548 sites recorded in the PMSL dataset. The results of that effort are outlined in this posting and it represents the maximal amount of historical sea level acceleration information that I can derive.
Where The Data Are
The PMSL dataset that I had downloaded had site information for a total of 1548 tidal gauge sites, but only 1537 sites had local sea level data. Records begin in 1807 for the tide gauge in Brest, France, and the information that I had finished at the end of 2021.
To get a measure of sea level rise acceleration, ideally I would use 25 years (plus 1 month) of data centered about a point in time and I fitted a quadratic polynomial to the data. Because of missing data, the raw information can resemble Swiss cheese at times, so I relaxed the rules a bit so that I required that, for a given month at a site, there had to be a minimum of 200 valid data points within the plus or minus 12.5 year time window surrounding that month. The choice of 200 as a cutoff was arbitrary, but reasonable given that it meant that there were sufficient data points to get some decent fitting statistics and that both the time preceding and after the chosen month are represented.
In Fig. 1, I show the number of sites that could contribute acceleration data points to the overall record as a function of time. Note the logarithmic scale. There are very few usable sites in the first part of the 19th century, but after about 1880, things pick up a bit. By about 1920, the density of available date becomes much more substantial.
In Fig. 1, I show the number of sites that could contribute acceleration data points to the overall record as a function of time. Note the logarithmic scale. There are very few usable sites in the first part of the 19th century, but after about 1880, things pick up a bit. By about 1920, the density of available date becomes much more substantial.
Figure 1: Where the data are. Number of sites with valid sea level acceleration values for each month covered by the PMSL dataset.
I also would like to express a mea culpa about my earlier article. I had neglected to calculate error estimates for the sea level acceleration values, which is a bit embarrassing for me given that the late great Derek York was my PhD supervisor. Derek was the man who taught isotope geochemists how to properly fit straight lines through arrays of isotope ratio data points, and before you scoff at that and say it’s trivial, in fact it is a tricky bit of nonlinear inverse theory. So as penance, I have endeavored to provide error estimates for acceleration values in this article.
But first, I want to address an issue raised in the comments from my previous article. It deals with the issue raised that it is important to look at the details of each site’s local conditions and that such factors can significantly affect the apparent sea level rise acceleration. In the next section, I look at this question, which to a certain extent hinges on the philosophical distinction in scientific communities between “lumpers” and “splitters”. I was trained as an engineer and worked in both physics and geology departments. Physicists tend to be “lumpers”, i.e., they are delighted if they can mostly explain a phenomenon. “Splitters” delight in examining all of the exquisite details and are never happy until all of the different details of a phenomenon are categorized. Geologists tend to be splitters. Because I am fundamentally a lazy person, I tend to fall into the lumper category, and I confess my sins happily.
The Acceleration Record is Mostly Global, Mostly
It was argued that local effects like the pumping of groundwater might cause an increase of local sea level rise. My original take was that this was an anthropological effect that should show up as positive, recent acceleration. However, it was also noted that if pumping stopped, that this could show up as a deceleration and be misconstrued as being a natural phenomenon. I decided to do a little test of this hypothesis and the results are shown in Fig. 2.
It was argued that local effects like the pumping of groundwater might cause an increase of local sea level rise. My original take was that this was an anthropological effect that should show up as positive, recent acceleration. However, it was also noted that if pumping stopped, that this could show up as a deceleration and be misconstrued as being a natural phenomenon. I decided to do a little test of this hypothesis and the results are shown in Fig. 2.
Figure 2: Results of a randomized trial with subsets of sites having strictly local sea level rise beginning 1950-1970 and ending 1970-1995. See text for details
For this thought experiment, a percentage of sites, varying from 5% to 25% had local enhancement of sea level rise, presumably caused by increased groundwater use beginning somewhere from 1950 to 1970 and ending some time between 1970 and 1995. Start and stop times were randomized as it was assumed that local effects would not be synchronized around the world. Similarly, the amount of subsidence cause by water pumping was allowed to uniformly vary up to 5 mm/yr. The results show that even if a full quarter of all sites had significant time varying local subsidence, one would expect that the overall effect on the complete local sea level acceleration record to be significantly less than the PNAS2018 acceleration value. So, yes, local effects can show up as oscillations in the global sea level rise, but the effect is likely to be small compared to the variations calculated by the complete PMSL dataset. To get the wiggles seen in Fig. 2 to compare with the PNAS2018 value, you need to squint and increase the rate of subsidence and/or increase the percentage of sites with manic pumping.
Results
The results of compiling all of the tide gauge record data are shown in Fig. 3. The sites were sorted into 5×5 degree latitude and longitude grid cells and for each month of the record, an error weighted average for every cell was calculated. To combine the information over the set of 321 grid cells that contributed to the record, a weighted average that included both error and grid cell area was calculated. The record plotted in Fig. 3 has been smoothed by removing the 3 highest frequency components from its CEEMD decomposition. The light blue shading in Fig. 3 shows both 1 and 2 sigma error bars and the results of the 25% local pumping study shown in Fig. 2 is shown for comparison. Note that as the number of sites contributing to the record increases with time (see Fig. 1), the width of the error bars shrinks. Note that my global historical sea level rise record agrees quite well with the PNAS2018 value.
To interpret what the record may mean, it’s important to note that whenever sea level acceleration equals zero, this corresponds to either a local maximum or a local minimum of the sea level rise relative to a constant linear trend. With that in mind, I estimate that there were local minima around the following years: 1883, 1902, 1922, 1958, and 1977. Local maxima occurred around 1893, 1915, 1940, and 1965. I’m trying to ignore minor excursions either plus or minus. We’ve been in a fairly protracted period of positive acceleration since 1977, but we flirted with deceleration around 2003. My estimate of the beginning of the positive acceleration is a tad later than that of Dangendorf et al. (2019). It’s certainly possible that some of the record is due to anthropogenic inputs, but is it “temperature” or “climate-change” driven? I try to address this question in Fig. 4.
Correlation or Causation?
Figure 4: Sea level acceleration compared to SST acceleration since 1880.
Fig. 4 shows the raw, unsmoothed sea level acceleration record, with annual variations included, compared to the HadCRUT4 sea surface temperature (SST) acceleration. Error estimates are included for the sea level record, but for clarity they are not included for SST. Typical SST errors are visually similar in size at this scale to sea level errors after about 1950. The overall correlation coefficient for the two functions since 1880 is 0.44 with a lag of zero months. As shown in my previous post, that’s not really a very high correlation coefficient for a function with this degree of autocorrelation. However, just by eye, it seems that there is some correlation, at least in the first half of the records. Something significant appears to have happened to both temperature and sea level at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Then sea level variations settle down a bit, but the two records still seem to be on the same dance card until about 1950 or so. However, after that, SST and sea level appear to become decoupled. See the large positive SST acceleration in the late 1960s, with nary a response from sea level. I think that sea level rise since about 1950 may have been significantly influenced by anthropogenic factors, but temperature is not likely to be the mechanism.
I’m just wildly speculating here, but I wonder if the variations seen in sea level acceleration since about 1950 might be caused by the building of large dam projects for decelerations, and mining of ancient groundwater for accelerations. The destruction of dams and/or the enhanced release of reservoir water, a so-called “snail darter” effect, could also lead to sea level rise acceleration. I don’t have the data on hand to say one way or the other, but it’s an interesting thought. A big caveat, however, is that the number of tidal gauge sites included in the record in its early part are measured in the dozens or scores, while near the end, they are measured in the hundreds. So it is quite possible that the correlation between sea level and SST in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a coincidence.
In conclusion, I think that the sea level acceleration derived here from the entire tidal gauge record is close to the most you can squeeze out of the PMSL dataset. Of course, one could add in things like volcanic and ENSO effects, but to me those are just natural phenomena, the timing of which we neither fully understand nor can control. We may be affecting sea level rise acceleration, but it does not appear to be due to a rise in sea surface temperature. Could we then paraphrase Cassius by saying that the fault dear Brutus is not in our SUVs, but in our dams?
References
Dangendorf, S., Hay, C., Calafat, F.M., Marcos, M., Piecuch, C.G., Berk, K. and Jensen, J., 2019. Persistent acceleration in global sea-level rise since the 1960s. Nature Climate Change, 9(9), pp.705-710.
Nerem, R.S., Beckley, B.D., Fasullo, J.T., Hamlington, B.D., Masters, D. and Mitchum, G.T., 2018. Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 115(9), pp.2022-2025.
Simon J. Holgate, Andrew Matthews, Philip L. Woodworth, Lesley J. Rickards, Mark E. Tamisiea, Elizabeth Bradshaw, Peter R. Foden, Kathleen M. Gordon, Svetlana Jevrejeva, and Jeff Pugh (2013) New Data Systems and Products at the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level. Journal of Coastal Research: Volume 29, Issue 3: pp. 493 – 504. doi:10.2112/JCOASTRES-D-12-00175.1.
On Monday Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a proposal to target ESG banking and investment policies
DeSantis said he aims to enact protections for Floridians against discrimination by big banks and large financial institutions for their religious, political, or social beliefs.
ESG – environmental, social, and governance – is a business framework that determines investment based on political factors such as renewable energy and social justice initiatives.
DeSantis said ESG has developed into a “mechanism to inject political ideology into investment decisions, corporate governance, and really just the the everyday economy.”
“That is not ultimately something that is going to work out well for us here in Florida,” he said.
DeSantis said it violates the fiduciary duty that executives have to the shareholders of publicly traded companies.
“Your pension money, your retirement money, is likely invested in some of these funds, and those funds should be done to try to produce the best result for you using the available investment options,” DeSantis said.
“What ESG says is no, we’re not going to do, even if it would do a better return – we’re not going to allow you to invest in certain areas, you’re not allowed to invest in oil and gas, you’re not allowed to invest in disfavored areas,” he explained.
The proposal includes prohibiting the financial sector from considering “social credit scores” in banking and lending practices that aim to prevent Floridians from obtaining loans, lines of credit, and bank accounts.
“That is a way to try to change people’s behavior. It’s a way to try to impose politics on what should just be economic decisions,” he said.
“We are also not going to house in either the state or local government level deposits. And we have a lot of deposit, we got a massive budget surplus in Florida, you have deposits all over the place that go in where state and local government use financial institutions, none of those deposits will be permitted to be done in institutions that are pursuing this woke ESG agenda,” he said.
The proposal would also aim to make sure ESG will not “infect decisions” at both the state and local governments, such as investment decisions, procurement and contracting, or bonds.
The Governor’s press release said the legislation would also:
Prohibit banks that engage in corporate activism from holding government funds as a Qualified Public Depository (QPD).
Prohibit the use of ESG in all investment decisions at the state and local level, ensuring that fund managers only consider financial factors that maximize the highest rate of return.
Prohibit all state and local entities, including direct support organizations, from considering, giving preference to, or requesting information about ESG as part of the procurement and contracting process.
Prohibit the use of ESG factors by state and local governments when issuing bonds, including a contract prohibition on rating agencies whose ESG ratings negatively impact the issuer’s bond ratings.
Direct the Attorney General and Commissioner of Financial Regulation to enforce these provisions to the fullest extent of the law.
Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis praised DeSantis’ proposal to crack down on ESG.
“When it comes to ESG, many of us have been boiled like a frog,” Patronis said. “The Governor is right that over time ESG has wound its way into too many aspects of American society, and pulling it back is going to take work.”
“This proposed legislation puts returns first, it puts the Constitution first, and it puts corporate America on notice that if they play politics with Florida residents, we’ll have the tools to hold them accountable. I look forward to working with the DeSantis Administration, as well as Senate President Passidomo and House Speaker Renner in getting this legislation over the finish line,” Patronis said.
Patronis previously barred ESG funds’ participation in the deferred compensation program and divested around $2 billion from BlackRock due to their utilization of ESG.
House Speaker Paul Renner said Bob Rommel, R-Naples, will introduce the bill in the House. “The biggest thing that I think ESG represents is a total hijacking of democracy,” said Renner.
“We’re lucky here in the state of Florida, that we’ve got a governor who will stand up to things like ESG, when others will not,” he said.
“This is amazing what he’s doing for our state, our state is just rocketing,” said Senate President Kathleen Passidomo. “I look forward to having the governor come back here again and again and again to sign all these bills,” she said.
House Speaker Paul Renner said Bob Rommel, R-Naples, will introduce the bill in the House. “The biggest thing that I think ESG represents is a total hijacking of democracy,” said Renner.
“We’re lucky here in the state of Florida, that we’ve got a governor who will stand up to things like ESG, when others will not,” he said.
“This is amazing what he’s doing for our state, our state is just rocketing,” said Senate President Kathleen Passidomo. “I look forward to having the governor come back here again and again and again to sign all these bills,” she said.
“No evidence is found for any systematic trend in precipitation deficits attributable to anthropogenic climate change.” – O’Connell et al., 2022
In a new study (O’Connell et al., 2022), scientists use a stochastic or random probability distribution analysis to assess whether a signal in global precipitation deficits (droughts) could be linked to anthropogenic climate change (ACC) over the 1900-2013 period.
The exhaustive analysis revealed no or pattern that could be statistically validated to support claims that global precipitation deficits are linked to ACC. Instead, no clear trend has emerged that falls outside the range natural variability.
In fact, the authors found that there was globally more intensive precipitation deficits observed from 1901-1938 (Period 1), when CO2 levels were lingering in the 300-310 ppm range, than since the late 1970s when CO2 rose to over 400 ppm. The most recent decades are observed to be associated with the lowest precipitation deficit intensification.
This is actually the opposite trend direction if ACC and rising CO2 were indeed a driving cause of global drought.
The authors caution climate modelers to avoid leaping to conclusions about a link between ACC and global precipitation without utilizing randomized probability statistical analyses. Failure to do so can bias results in favor of desired outcomes.
There is already a politicized tendency to “start from the premise that ACC is an explanatory factor [for global drought], and set out to prove it” rather than follow the scientific method (i.e., falsify the null hypothesis that natural climate processes are causal using real-world observational data).
Once again, evidence of times in the past long before the industrial era when warming similar to or in excess of the present ‚crisis‘ conditions occurred in a polar region. Natural climate variation is the norm.
Once again, evidence of times in the past long before the industrial era when warming similar to or in excess of the present ‚crisis‘ conditions occurred in a polar region. Natural climate variation is the norm. – – – Studying the response of Antarctic ice sheets to past warming episodes is essential to understand how they may respond to the present warming climate, as their melting and collapse can contribute to global sea level rise, says Phys.org.
Detailed records of past ocean temperatures close to the continent are rare, but clues to how ice sheets and sea ice responded to global conditions in the past can be found in funny places—even in the remains of animals that once lived there.
A study led by the University of Maine used the presence (and eventual lack thereof) of elephant seals to illustrate how the area transformed in a warm period in the recent past.
The research was published online Feb. 7, 2023, and will be in the March 2023 edition of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.
A team of researchers led by Brenda Hall, professor at the University of Maine School of Earth and Climate Science, and Climate Change Institute, studied the remains of the southern elephant seal at sites along the Victoria Land Coast of the Ross Embayment, which borders both the West and East Antarctic ice sheets.
Today, the Victoria Land Coast is largely free of elephant seals and even penguins in many places because of shelves of permanent sea ice frozen to its beaches. Besides, modern elephant seals are based largely on subantarctic islands north of the Ross Sea.
Past UMaine research, however, uncovered elephant seal remains in the beaches suggesting the species flourished in the area during warm periods of the Holocene. They theorized that the seals were able to occupy the beaches in a period of warmth before extensive sea ice pushed them off of the present-day coast.
For this study, the scientists gathered the mummified and skeletal remains of elephant seals, as well as their molted skin, buried under rocks and snow banks along the Victoria Land Coast, ultimately recovering 305 samples, which they radiocarbon dated and tested for ancient DNA.
„Southern elephant seals today tend to haul out in much warmer areas than the Ross Sea,“ Hall says. „We were able to use the presence of their molted skin and hair, as well as some bones and mummies desiccated by the polar wind, to show that these seals had once made the Ross Sea their home.“
The results from the molted skin, bones and other remains showed that southern elephant seals not only once occupied the Ross Sea, but were present on the Victoria Land Coast from about 7,000 and 500 years ago. The presence of the seals at this time indicated that there was a reduced amount of ice covering the sea during this time of the Holocene, which coincides with other records of ocean temperatures and circulation in the Ross Sea.
„Our work shows that for much of the Holocene, the Ross Sea was less icy and presumably warmer than it is today and this warmth may have driven retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from the Ross Sea during the last 8,000 years and future warming could continue to push ice retreat,“ Hall says. „However, ocean temperature may not be the entire story.“
Even the BBC has to admit the significance of a few seasons is hard to gauge… ‚Scientists consider the behaviour of Antarctic sea-ice to be a complicated phenomenon which cannot simply be ascribed to climate change.
Looking at the data from the last 40-odd years of available satellite data, the sea-ice extent shows great variability. A downward trend to smaller and smaller amounts of summer ice is only visible in the past few years.‘ – – – In 2017: Scientists found 91 volcanoes under Antarctica ‚The volcanoes are located in the West Antarctic Rift System.‘ [see link for map]
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the agency charged with reviewing the matter, crafted a draft EIS that is “woefully inadequate” in addressing potential impacts to severely endangered right whales.
CFACT has joined with the Heartland Institute and American Coalition for Ocean Protection in submitting a hard-hitting public comment spotlighting numerous deficiencies found the government’s draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and demanding that federal regulators deny a request by Dominion Energy to build a massive offshore wind turbine complex off the coast of Virginia.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the agency charged with reviewing the matter, crafted a draft EIS that is “woefully inadequate” in addressing potential impacts to severely endangered right whales. In its zeal to push intermittent, inefficient wind energy on the nation, the Biden Administration is glossing over potentially devastating threats to the whales. This is particularly shocking to those of us used to seeing federal bureaucrats blow up insignificant threats to species to thwart development projects that are both productive and benign.
Dominion claims that it will use “mitigation” and “minimization” techniques to limit harm to the whales. What could those be? You won’t find out from the Feds, nor will you find hard estimates on what the turbines will do to the whales. The crucial information has been redacted! When CFACT requested the information in a letter direct to Dominion they demurred, and referred us back to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Mangement. How’s that for a “Catch 22?”
Without this information the public is left in the dark as to how Dominion intends to comply with the zero-kill mandate required by BOEM.
All this opaque bureaucratic nonfeasance is inconveniently occurring at a time when dead whales have been washing ashore along the eastern seaboard.
The public has a right to see and evaluate Dominion’s submissions and the Bureau of Ocean Management’s data in their entirety before any permit is issued to start construction on a wind project which will radically transform our coastal waters and could mean the end of a species of whales with less than 350 members left.
Press Release: Groups Demand F/ederal Regulators Reject Virginia Offshore Wind Project to Save Right Whale
In a recent conversation, I was shown a chart of Australia’s wholesale electricity prices, by state, in which South Australia had by far the lowest prices of all the states. The presenter of the chart claimed that this proved how renewables drove down the cost of electricity.
But there were two small problems:
1. The chart was a real time price shart, showing just the prices at that particular point in time, and
2. The South Australian electricity price was a very large negative number. In other words, they were struggling to find anyone to use the electricity even if paid to take it.
As many have pointed out, negative electricity prices don’t mean that electricity is cheap, it just means that the generator has costs that are not being recovered. Those costs will have to be recovered at some time or they will go out of business. In other words, negative electricity prices actually drive up the overall cost.
In order to see the full picture, you have to look at … the full picture.
I started by looking at the latest report from AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) .
[East coast] Wholesale spot prices averaged $93 per megawatt-hour (MWh) across all National Electricity Market (NEM) regions, with Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania at Q4 record highs. However, prices have eased from extreme levels seen early in the year. [Most of South Australia got separated following a transmission tower failure.]
New minimum operational demand records were set in Q4 … South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales all recorded new minimums for any quarter since NEM start, and Queensland its lowest Q4 operational demand since 2002.
Output from wind and grid-scale solar grew strongly as new facilities were connected and commissioned. Although the NEM’s wind fleet recorded its lowest recent quarterly utilisation rate, Q4 2022 was the highest wind generation for any Q4 on record. Queensland and New South Wales saw large increases in grid-scale solar, setting daytime prices more frequently than in the same quarter last year.
The instantaneous penetration of renewable energy for the NEM as a proportion of total generation reached 68.7% on 28 October 2022, exceeding the previous record of 64.1% (set on 22 September 2022).
So, wind and solar generation grew strongly, their penetration hit a record high, wind generation was at a Q4 record high, yet wind usage sank in percentage terms, demand sank to record lows, and prices hit a Q4 record high.
It really doesn’t look like wind or solar bring prices down.
Let me re-phrase that last sentence to make it a bit clearer: It looks like wind and solar are an absolute disaster.
OK, so that’s Australia. What about the rest of the world?
I expect that everyone here has seen this chart from ClimateDepot:
That chart is from back in January 2018, so I downloaded the latest available household electricity prices (June 2022) and wind and solar % equivalent primary energy data (2021), and put together an updated chart. Renewables are by % of energy, instead of by watts/capita, which is possibly more representative.
Apologies for having electricity price as X axis instead of Y axis.
A few things stand out in the updated chart:
There’s definitely a visible correlation, with higher wind+solar relating to higher electricity prices.
Electricity prices in Denmark (DNK) and Germany (DEU) and some other countries have nearly doubled in the last five years. Greece (GRC) has done much better (I don’t know why – work looking at?)
Britain (GBR) is a disaster area.
Denmark has by far the most renewable energy (mostly wind), in percentage terms, yet is only the highest-cost country by a narrow margin. Maybe using Norway’s hydro as a battery, although expensive, helps to use more of the wind generation. Unlike South Australia, for example, which often can’t even give it away.
A lot of the countries with very low electricity prices are oil/gas producing countries which keep household electricity prices low through subsidies. That’s not a viable option for fuel-importing countries. Nevertheless, the implication is that the countries that do use a higher percentage of non-renewables energy (which must be mostly coal, gas, nuclear and some hydro) do tend to have lower electricity prices.
Conclusion: From all of the above, ie. from looking at the full picture, wind and solar demonstrably drive up the cost of electricity.
But then, everyone who reads outside the controlled media already knew that.
Green energies making life in Germany unaffordable…we’ll have no heat and lights and be happy
We’ve all heard about the excruciatingly high energy prices Germans are forced to pay in the wake of the Energiewende (transition to green energies).
Yet, due to the fact that my own household had made a contract in 2021 that locked the heating gas and electricity prices for 2 years, our rates had stayed reasonably low. But that contract expires on April 1st, 2023, and last week we got the long awaited letter announcing the new prices from our gas and electric utility.
87% jump
Let’s start with electricity. Over the past 2 years we’ve been paying 21.77 euro-cents per kilowatt hour. Compared to other households that is a very low price:
Excerpt of the letter announcing our new electricity prices.
But beginning April 2nd, the price will skyrocket, almost doubling, to 40.63 euro-cents a kilowatt-hour. That’s an 87% jump! Hate to imagine what that would mean for an energy-intensive company.
Gas explosion
Next we look at the new natural gas prices, which are important if we want to keep warm. Below we see that old price was 5.6 euro-cents a kilowatt-hour, which expires on April 2nd, 2023.
Excerpt of the letter announcing new heating gas prices.
On April 2nd, the new price jumps to a whopping 14.66 euro-cents per kilowatt-hour, a hefty 162% price increase! The EU likes to blame Putin for the high gas prices, but we all know what the real reason is:
Monthly that’s going to translate into some bills that are going to take some getting used to.
But my household is still one of the few lucky ones. Some 10 years ago we had installed 12.5 kilowatt capacity solar panels (10,000 kwh production annually), which more than offsets the higher electricity prices.
Burning wood to keep warm
And late last fall we installed a wood burning stove, which will keep the heating costs down, as we have a cheap supply of firewood. Most other fellow citizens are less fortunate, though, because they don’t have those kinds of options, especially those who rent apartments. Many double-income families are struggling and see little hope for the future.
Unfortunately the price hikes don’t end there. High energy prices have caused the price of everything to surge…especially food.
Midsummer in the Antarctic – no picnic. – – – Adventurer Jamie Douglas-Hamilton says his latest rowing challenge in the world’s most treacherous waters has left him in the worst pain he has ever felt, reports BBC News.
“I still can’t feel my fingertips and can’t wiggle my toes,” he says.
“I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom from my bed without hanging on to things along the way.”
Jamie was part of a crew of six who battled 30ft (10m) waves, crippling seasickness, icy cold winds and constant terror in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean and Scotia Sea.
They managed 407 miles in six days before the strong winds and the risk of frostbite led them to end the challenge early.
Jamie said the conditions from the start were “horrendous” and the crew narrowly escaped a fast-moving ice floe when leaving King George Island.
The 41-year-old Edinburgh adventurer suffered frost nip in his hands and feet during the icy row, which became excruciating on arriving home.
The trip was originally planned for December 2021 but had to be postponed as Jamie discovered he had a heart condition that he believes would have killed him on the journey.
He took on the challenge just five months after he had open-heart surgery in August 2022, which made him feel like he had been hit by a bus.
The international crew set off on 11 January from King George Island, 120km (75 miles) off the coast of Antarctica in the Southern Ocean.
They rowed in 90-minute shifts for six days.
The challenge took them via Elephant Island to Laurie Island, the second largest of the South Orkney Islands – about 604km (375 miles) north-east of the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
They had originally planned to carry on another 500 miles to South Georgia Island but the conditions were too tough.
“We all suffered from sea sickness to some degree and one member had chronic sea sickness to the point he couldn’t hold any food or liquid down and was evacuated to the supervising vessel following us before getting hypothermia,” Jamie said.
“The strong westerly and north-westerly winds made getting far enough north to reach South Georgia less and less likely, and if we had continued we would have had less than 50% chance of getting there.
“This became all the more clear with one rower down and several others developing frost bite.”
Jamie added: “The waves were enormous and it was like looking up at fast moving walls of water the size of warehouses.
“We came so close to fully capsizing many times in the freezing water. It was very worrying.
“These rowing boats are designed for the warm weather of mid-Atlantic crossings and the cabins were like cold, humid fridges with everything being soaking wet including our sleeping bags.
“Our legs would sometimes shake uncontrollably and then this moved to our torso and came close to hypothermia.”
Gabriella Hoffman
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