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.
Biden Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg: “Climate is not nonsense. Dealing with climate change is one of the biggest things that people like me and people like him will be remembered for after we’re gone.”
Biden Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg on CNN: “Climate is not nonsense. Dealing with climate change is one of the biggest things that people like me and people like him (GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell) will be remembered for after we’re gone.”
This is the robotic, sanctimonious voice of a climate lunatic who would gladly make you poor, weak, and miserable to achieve climate reductions that are both immeasurable and worthless pic.twitter.com/MAEEymzJ8U
Biden Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg: “Climate is not nonsense. Dealing with climate change is one of the biggest things that people like me and people like him will be remembered for after we’re gone.”
Buttigieg pushes back on McConnell criticism of ‘woke initiatives’ – Yahoo News: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday pushed back after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized him for focusing on what the GOP leader called “woke initiatives” over the recent train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio. “Even amidst a catalog of crises on his watch, from this and other recent train derailments to the meltdown in air travel back during the holiday season, Secretary Buttigieg has seemed more interested in pursuing press coverage for woke initiatives and climate nonsense than in attending to basic elements of his day job,” McConnell had said on the Senate floor. …
“As for climate, climate is not nonsense. Dealing with climate change is one of the biggest things that people like me, and people like him will be remembered for after we’re gone.”
As U.S. Sec of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg focuses on “every transportation decision” being a “climate decision”, China-made cars take over the world.
Flooding and wind damage from hurricanes is getting more common in the United States, and that trend will accelerate and threaten millions of people as the Earth gets hotter according to new research.
The findings highlight a counterintuitive effect of climate change: coastal communities are experiencing dangerous storms more frequently, even though the total number of storms doesn’t appear to be changing.
“I think it’s important for the public to take [this] seriously,” says Adam Sobel, a climate scientist at Columbia University who was not involved in the new study. “The storms are getting stronger. So even for the same number of storms, the number that are a real problem goes up because they are strengthening.”
This trend is already clear for people living in places that have been hit by multiple devastating storms in recent years, such as southern Louisiana.
The new study uses computer models to assess Atlantic storms going back to 1949, and to peer into the future to see what storms will look like in 2100. The authors, climate scientists at Princeton University, found that the flood and wind risk posed by storms has steadily increased.
The problem will only get worse in the coming decades. “The frequency of intense storms will increase,” explains Ning Lin, a climate scientist at Princeton University and the lead author of the new study.
Lin and her colleagues also found another sobering trend. Today it is unlikely that two damaging storms will hit the same place in quick succession, although such disasters got slightly more likely over the second half of the twentieth century.
When sequential storms do happen, it’s deadly, like when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 or when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas in quick succession in 2017.
But by 2100, such consecutive shocks will become relatively commonplace, according to the new analysis.
That’s bad news for multiple reasons. “Communities need to recover from disasters and bounce back,” says Lin. If people are being hit by flooding and wind damage over and over, there’s less time to recover.
It could also overwhelm the government’s emergency response. That happened in 2017, when the Federal Emergency Management Agency struggled to respond to three major storms at the same time, and millions of people were left waiting for basic assistance with food and shelter.
The first thing to note is that the three authors of this study are not hurricane experts, but computer modellers.
And this study does not base its conclusions on any actual data, but on a probabilistic model.
The actual data however tells a totally different story, as the most powerful storms are not increasing in frequency on multi-decadal and century scales:
The paper references Hurricanes Ida and Nicholas which hit Louisiana in quick succession in 2021, but totally ignores the drought of major hurricanes between 2005 and 2017.
It is also important to take account of the dip in major hurricane activity during the cold phase of the AMO in the 1970s and 80s. There is no mention of this in their paper, so any computer modelling and projections derived therefrom are invalid.
There is ample data on US landfalling hurricanes going back to the 19thC, Why then do we need probabilistic models instead?
Earlier this month, CFACT released the first episode of its new YouTube series titled “Capitol Pink.” With its tagline, “the podcast that teaches you how to think, not what to think,” the series focuses on issues like free speech, censorship, technology, energy and environmental policy, and more, from a younger, female perspective. The host, Shakira Jackson, is a former CFACT Driessen Fellow Collegians intern from the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford.
In the first episode, Jackson spoke with Cristen Lameira of Florida International University about her struggles for free speech on campus.
Yet the issue of free speech was too important to leave to just one episode. To continue that conversation, Jackson sits down with Tamon Hamlett, a legal studies major at the University of Central Florida with a penchant for the First Amendment. Hamlett explains how a school event was almost cancelled due to disgruntled protesters, which leads to a deeper dialogue about freedom of expression.
CFACT, founded in 1985 by Craig Rucker and the late (truly great) David Rothbard, examines the relationship between human freedom, and issues of energy, environment, climate, economics, civil rights and more.
In the past few weeks, a series of analyses published by highly respected researchers have exposed a truth about public health officials during COVID: Much of the time, they were wrong.
To be clear, public health officials were not wrong for making recommendations based on what was known at the time. That’s understandable. You go with the data you have.
No, they were wrong because they refused to change their directives in the face of new evidence.
When a study did not support their policies, they dismissed it and censored opposing opinions.
At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weaponized research itself by putting out its own flawed studies in its own non-peer-reviewed medical journal, MMWR.
In the final analysis, public health officials actively propagated misinformation that ruined lives and forever damaged public trust in the medical profession.
Here are 10 ways they misled Americans:
Misinformation #1: Natural immunity offers little protection compared to vaccinated immunity
A Lancet study looked at 65 major studies in 19 countries on natural immunity. The researchers concluded that natural immunity was at least as effective as the primary COVID vaccine series. In fact, the scientific data was there all along — from 160 studies,despite the findings of these studies violating Facebook’s “misinformation” policy.
Since the Athenian plague of 430 BC, it has been observed that those who recovered after infection were protected against severe disease if reinfected. That was also the observation of nearly every practicing physician during the first 18 months of the COVID pandemic.
Most Americans who were fired for not having the COVID vaccine already had antibodies that effectively neutralized the virus, but they were antibodies that the government did not recognize.
Cochran Reviews are considered the most authoritative and independent assessment of the evidence in medicine. And one published last month by a highly respected Oxford research team found that masks had no significant impact on COVID transmission.
When asked about this definitive review, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky downplayed it, arguing that it was flawed because it focused on randomized controlled studies.
But that was the greatest strength of the review! Randomized studies are considered the gold standard of medical evidence.
If all the energy used by public health officials to mask toddlers could have been channeled to reduce child obesity by encouraging outdoor activities, we would be better off.
Misinformation #3: School closures reduce COVID transmission
The CDC ignored the European experience of keeping schools open, most without mask mandates. Transmission rates were no different, evidenced by studies conducted in Spain and Sweden.
Misinformation #4: Myocarditis from the vaccine is less common than from the infection
Public health officials downplayed concerns about vaccine-induced myocarditis — or inflammation of the heart muscle. They cited poorly designed studies that under-captured complication rates.
A flurry of well-designed studies said the opposite. We now know that myocarditis is six to 28 times more common after the COVID vaccine than after the infection among 16- to 24-year-old males.
Tens of thousands of children likely got myocarditis, mostly subclinical, from a COVID vaccine they did not need because they were entirely healthy or because they already had COVID.
Misinformation #5: Young people benefit from a vaccine booster
Boosters reduced hospitalizations in older, high-risk Americans. But the evidence was never there that they lower COVID mortality in young, healthy people.
That’s probably why the CDC chose not to publish its data on hospitalization rates among boosted Americans under 50, when it published the same rates for those over 50.
Ultimately, White House pressure to recommend boosters for all was so intense that the FDA’s two top vaccine experts left the agency in protest, writing scathing articles on how the data did not support boosters for young people.
President Biden and other officials demanded that unvaccinated workers, regardless of their risk or natural immunity, be fired. They demanded that soldiers be dishonorably dischargedand nurses be laid off in the middle of a staffing crisis.
The mandate was based on the theory that vaccination reduced transmission rates — a notion later proven to be false.
But after the broad recognition that vaccination does not reduce transmission, the mandates persisted, and still do to this day.
A recent study from George Mason University details how vaccine mandates in nine major US cities had no impact on vaccination rates. They also had no impact on COVID transmission rates.
Misinformation #7: COVID originating from the Wuhan lab is a conspiracy theory
Google admitted to suppressing searches of “lab leak” during the pandemic. Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, claimed (and still does) he didn’t believe the virus came from a lab.
Ultimately, overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to a lab leak origin — the same origin suggested to Dr. Anthony Fauci by two very prominent virologists in a January 2020 meeting he assembled at the beginning of the pandemic.
According to documents obtained by Bret Baier of Fox News, they told Fauci and Collins that the virus may have been manipulated and originated in the lab, but then suddenly changed their tune in public comments days after meeting with the NIH officials.
The virologists were later awarded nearly $9 million from Fauci’s agency.
Misinformation #8: It was important to get the second vaccine dose three or four weeks after the first dose
Data were clear in the spring of 2021, just months after the vaccine rollout, that spacing the vaccine out by three months reduces complication rates and increases immunity.
Spacing out vaccines would have also saved more lives when Americans were rationing a limited vaccine supply at the height of the epidemic.
Misinformation #9: Data on the bivalent vaccine is ‘crystal clear’
Dr. Ashish Jha famously said this, despite the bivalent vaccine being approved using data from eight mice. To date, there has never been a randomized controlled trial of the bivalent vaccine.
In my opinion, the data are crystal clear that young people should not get the bivalent vaccine. It would have also spared many children myocarditis.
Misinformation #10: One in five people get long COVID
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 20% of COVID infections can result in long COVID.
But a UK study found that only 3% of COVID patients had residual symptoms lasting 12 weeks. What explains the disparity?
It’s often normal to experience mild fatigue or weakness for weeks after being sick and inactive and not eating well. Calling these cases long COVID is the medicalization of ordinary life.
Summary
What’s most amazing about all the misinformation conveyed by CDC and public health officials is that there have been no apologies for holding on to their recommendations for so long after the data became apparent that they were dead wrong.
Public health officials said “you must” when the correct answer should have been “we’re not sure.”
Early on, in the absence of good data, public health officials chose a path of stern paternalism.
Today, they are in denial of a mountain of strong studies showing that they were wrong.
Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region.
Natural climate variation is and always has been an ongoing process in Antarctica, just like everywhere else. Research suggests conditions similar to recent years prevailed about 850 years ago in at least one region. – – – Mosses, one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica, have a tenuous existence, threatened by advancing glaciers, says the U.S. National Science Foundation.
When glaciers move, they can entomb or cover a plant — starving it of light and warmth. Scientists have discovered that the timing of when a glacier killed a moss, the kill date, provides an archive of glacier history.
The date the plant died coincides with the time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, the previously entombed mosses are exposed, now dead and black.
In U.S. National Science Foundation-supported research published in the Geological Society of America journal Geology, Dulcinea Groff of the University of Wyoming and colleagues determined kill dates by using radiocarbon dating of previously ice-entombed, dead black mosses to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years.
“What’s so valuable about these kill dates compared to other records [such as the ages of glacial erratics or penguin remains] is their accuracy,” says Groff. They provide a clear picture of climate history.
“This study is important because it allows for a better understanding of climate history and the timing of glacier advance and retreat in the past by the novel application of precisely dating entombed mosses,” says Michael Jackson of NSF’s Office of Polar Programs.
Groff and colleagues collected black mosses around the northern Antarctic Peninsula by exploring the edges of glaciers at several locations. Then, by radiocarbon dating the mosses, they determined the phases of glacier advance. The finding is evidence for phases of cooler and potentially wetter conditions than today.
On Anvers Island, they learned that the last time the glacier was at its 2019 position was about 850 years ago. “We found that the glacier front with the fastest advance also had the fastest retreat, suggesting that hotspots of rapid coastal glacier dynamics occur in the Antarctic Peninsula,” says Groff.
Aussie EV drivers in the state of Victoria are supposed to photograph their mileage for the tax man every year, so they can be charged for using the roads.
Electric car registrations cancelled after not paying road user tax
Wednesday, Mar 1, 2023
More than 240 Victorian drivers have had their car registrations cancelled for failing to pay Australia’s first tax on electric and hybrid vehicles.
The Zero and Low-Emission Vehicle road user charge, which is currently facing a High Court challenge, levies a fee on every kilometre electric vehicle drivers travel each year.
But one Victorian driver said the tax had caused her registration to be cancelled without her knowledge and she only discovered her car was not allowed on roads six months later.
Victoria’s controversial electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle tax was introduced in July 2021 – a move Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas said was designed to “ensure all motorists pay their fair share to use our roads”.
The charge, raised to 2.6 cents per kilometre for electric vehicles last year, was introduced to replace revenue that would have been collected by the national excise on fuel.
Want to double the size of our transmission grid? At current growth rates, it’ll only take about 140 years!
Billionaires, bureaucrats, and academics claim that shifting to an all-renewable electricity system will require doubling or tripling the size of our high-voltage transmission grid. Talking about it is easy. Making it happen? That’s an entirely different story.
Last month, Michael Bloomberg, the New York-based mega-billionaire wrote an article for his news outlet that was headlined “Winter Blackouts Highlight Need For Clean Energy.” In the article, Bloomberg, who is giving $500 million to the Beyond Carbon project through his charity Bloomberg Philanthropies, claimed that our electric grid should rely more on weather-dependent renewables because “renewable energy has advantages over coal and gas in severe weather.”
The former mayor of New York went on, claiming that in addition to better batteries, the U.S. needs to build “the long-distance transmission lines” needed to carry more wind and solar energy. “When Chicago’s HVAC systems are kicking in, solar panels in the Southwest are reaching their maximum. We just need more high-speed wires to connect the two regions.” Set aside the silliness of “high-speed wires” (does electricity ever use “slow-speed wires”?) and focus on his key claim: “the faster we build transmission capacity…the healthier and safer our families and communities will be.”
In 2021, another billionaire, John Doerr, who like Bloomberg, is giving climate activist groups hundreds of millions of dollars (see my January 26, article “The Billionaires Behind The Gas Bans”) made a similar claim about the need for a massive expansion of the high-voltage transmission system. In his book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, Doerr lays out what he calls “Key Emission Reduction Policies” (page 333) including a clean electricity standard that could, in theory anyway, cut emissions by at least 50% by 2025 and 100% by 2040. In what amounts to a footnote, Doerr explains that his modeling assumes “a doubling of the transmission system above business as usual.”
That DOE press release appears to be referring to the massively hyped Net Zero America report, released in late 2020 by a group of academics at Princeton University. In one scenario, they claim that the U.S. could deploy staggering amounts of wind capacity (covering most of Missouri and eastern Iowa with wind turbines) and that to accommodate that much capacity, the U.S. will need to have a transmission capacity that is 3.2 times larger than the existing system by 2050.
This map was published on Tuesday by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. It claims to show the potential savings that could be had by building more high-voltage transmission capacity. The authors didn’t estimate the number of miles of line that would be needed or consider potential land-use conflicts.
Or consider a document published on Tuesday by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab which claimed that in 2022, “additional transmission could have reduced electricity system costs by more than in any year from 2012 to 2021.” The document includes a map (see above) with an overlay of a theoretical high-voltage system and how many millions of dollars it might save per 1,000 megawatts of transmission capacity. But the word “miles” doesn’t appear anywhere in the analysis. There’s no recognition that all that new transmission capacity has a physical footprint that will have to be quantified, mapped, and constructed. Instead, the authors of the report—at least two of whom are PhDs—explain that the focus of the “factsheet is the simple concept that transmission enables a lower cost set of generators to meet load than would otherwise be available.”
To that, my rather non-technical reply is: “no shit, professor.”
The problem with all of these claims and reports from the billionaires, bureaucrats, academics, and the elites working at our national laboratories, is that not one of them bothered to analyze how feasible their plans are or how their expansion schemes might actually work in the physical world. There’s not a single mention (or even a thought given) to the friction their plans might face from rural towns and counties. Not one of them bothered to do any comparisons about how much high-voltage capacity is being built every year in the United States or how long it might take to achieve the expansions they are envisioning.
Here’s the reality: the surge in land-use conflicts facing wind and solar projects across the country, a backlash I have documented in the newly updated Renewable Rejection Database (which is now searchable)––combined with the widespread opposition in rural America to high-voltage transmission projects––shows that such a massive expansion of the grid will not happen.
The numbers—and the history—do not lie. Let’s talk about the numbers first.
Last year, I contacted Jean Reaves Rollins, the president of the Atlanta-based consulting firm C Three Group, which tracks the growth of energy infrastructure across the U.S. I asked her to provide numbers for the growth of America’s high-voltage (230kV and above) transmission system since 2008. Rollins and her team graciously provided me with the data. The numbers are sobering.
Between 2008 and 2021, according to C Three Group, the U.S. high-voltage transmission system grew by about 1,700 miles per year. Thus, at current rates of growth, doubling the size of America’s high-voltage transmission grid will take about 140 years!
And recall, that the 1,700 miles per year of growth on the grid includes intrastate and interstate projects. Rollins and her team also provided figures for the growth of interstate high-voltage transmission. Those numbers are even more sobering. Between 2008 and 2021, the U.S. only added about 217 miles per year of interstate high-voltage transmission capacity. That means that the map from Lawrence Berkeley Lab showing continent-spanning transmission systems is nothing more than wishful thinking.
Rollins and her team also provided cost figures. Between 2008 and 2021, each new mile of high-voltage transmission capacity cost about $4 million. Thus, if those figures stay flat and the U.S. attempted to double its high-voltage transmission capacity, the cost to consumers would be about $1 trillion. But inflation and other factors will undoubtedly mean significantly higher costs. For instance, in California, the Tehachapi Renewable Transmission Project, which moves electricity from renewable generators in Kern County south to San Bernadino County, cost about $2 billion for a project that spans 173 miles, resulting in a cost of about $11 million per mile. Thus, attempting to double the size of our electric grid could cost $2 trillion, or even more.
But the cost figures may not be as important as the history of high-voltage transmission projects across the country––a history that is littered with the corpses of canceled and delayed projects. There are dozens of examples of the rural backlash against these projects. I’ll provide just a few of them.
In 2017, Iowa enacted a law prohibiting the use of eminent domain for high-voltage transmission lines. The move doomed the Rock Island Clean Line, a 500-mile, $2 billion, direct-current transmission line that aimed to carry electricity from Iowa to Illinois. The opposition forced the project’s developer, Houston-based Clean Line Energy Partners, to withdraw its application for the project in Iowa.
In early 2018, Clean Line Energy Partners announced it was suspending its years-long effort to build a 720-mile, $2.5 billion transmission line across the state of Arkansas. The Plains & Eastern Clean Line aimed to carry wind energy from Oklahoma to customers in the southern and southeastern US. But the project faced fierce opposition in Arkansas where the state’s entire Congressional delegation opposed the deal.
Also in 2018, New Hampshire regulators rejected a high-voltage electricity transmission project called Northern Pass Transmission that was to carry power from Quebec hydroelectric facilities to consumers in Massachusetts. But the 192-mile, $1.6 billion project––which was to go through New Hampshire’s White Mountains––was vetoed in a unanimous vote by the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee.
A similar high-voltage project, the $2.3 billion, 780-mile Grain Belt Express, has been delayed for years by opposition from rural residents in Missouri and other states. First proposed in 2010, the 4,000-megawatt project is designed to move electricity from Kansas to Indiana and other states. But in 2015, the Missouri Public Service Commission blocked the project after concluding the cost to the state’s landowners exceeded its benefits. The fight over the project was partially resolved in mid-2018 when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in favor of the transmission line. But the project is still facing permitting hurdles in Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois. Last month, an Illinois state legislator, Adam Neimerg, declared that the Grain Belt Express “does nothing to benefit the folks, energy-wise, here in the state of Illinois. So it takes property rights away from many folks.”
In addition, there are numerous examples of the long lead times involved in building transmission projects. For instance, the TransWest Express project aims to move wind energy from Wyoming to Utah, Nevada, and California. That project has been in development since 2005 but it still hasn’t begun construction. The project is owned by Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz’s The Anschutz Corporation. As I reported here last week, Anschutz’s Power Company of Wyoming is developing the giant Chokecherry and Sierra Madre wind project. It needs the TransWest project to carry the electricity from Wyoming to customers further west. The project is still waiting for final permits from the Bureau of Land Management. On its website, TransWest says it expects to begin construction sometime this year and finish the project in 2026. Thus, from start to finish (if it happens at all) the TransWest project will take more than two decades!
I could provide many other examples of the delays and cancellations of transmission projects. But the punchline is obvious: despite the never-ending hype about renewable energy, there is simply no way that the U.S. will be able to double (or triple) the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity needed to accommodate all of the envisioned wind and solar projects on any time frame that makes sense.
That leads to another equally obvious point: the electric grid we have today––that is, the poles, transformers, towers, wires, arresters, and other kit needed to move electricity from power plants to consumers––will look a lot like the grid we will have tomorrow, and next year, and for the next two or three decades. Given these facts, smart policymakers and utilities should be looking at ways to utilize the existing grid by putting new, low- or zero-carbon generation plants in locations that already have access to high-voltage transmission.
Some companies are considering that strategy. Last October, TerraPower, which is developing a small modular reactor, announced that it has begun a study to evaluate deploying its Natrium reactor at five coal plants that are now operated by PacifiCorp, which is owned by the mega-conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway. The study, according to PacifiCorp’s press release, will evaluate, among other things, the repurposing of “existing generation and transmission assets for the benefit of” the company’s customers.
Last September, the Department of Energy released a report which found that “80% of retired and operating coal power plant sites that were evaluated have the basic characteristics needed to be considered amenable to host an advanced nuclear reactor.” It is no surprise that the report is filled with references to the high-voltage transmission system and the fact that new nuclear plants “could use the existing transmission, transportation, and water infrastructure left behind from retired coal plants.”
It took more than a century for us to build our electric grid. It is the Mother Network, the network upon which all of our most-critical networks depend. If we are going to be serious about cutting greenhouse gas emissions, we need to give up on the all-renewable mirage. We need to accept the physical limitations of the electric grid we have, and get serious about adding more nuclear energy to our power mix by putting new, smaller, safer, cheaper nuclear reactors in places where generators are currently burning hydrocarbons.
“The belief in falling wind power costs is the central foundation of the government’s Net Zero enterprise, and it is demonstrably false. The absurdity of current Net Zero plans is now exposed for all to see.”
“The belief in falling wind power costs is the central foundation of the government’s Net Zero enterprise, and it is demonstrably false. The absurdity of current Net Zero plans is now exposed for all to see.”
London, 1 March – Net Zero Watch is highlighting the fact that claims of falling wind power costs are contradicted by demands from wind power operators for additional subsidies on top of existing support.
This debate has been in progress since 2017, when research published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation indicated that the wind industry’s bids for Contracts for Difference subsidies (CfDs) were absurdly low and did not reflect underlying capital and operating costs. These observations were confirmed by alternative methodologies and by other authors (details are given below), and critics repeatedly predicted that the industry would eventually beg for more subsidy.
Confirmation that we were correct can be found in the fact that the Financial Times is now reporting that wind farm developers, including the industry giants Vattenfall and Ørsted, are asking for tax breaks in the forthcoming budget, offering the spurious justification that inflation has made uneconomic their low Contracts for Difference contracts awarded for delivery in 2024 (FT: “Wind Farm Developers demand UK tax Breaks to offset Rising Costs”).
Net Zero Watch notes that since the CfD strike prices are inflation-indexed the industry’s excuse does not hold water. On the contrary, the demand for tax breaks confirms that the low bids in the CfD auctions were never accurate reflections of underlying windpower costs. Net Zero Watch says that the Chancellor should refuse to be blackmailed by the wind industry and must reject demands for further financial support.
Professor Gordon Hughes, author of several of the studies cited below, said:
“The offshore wind developers seeking additional subsidies are treating taxpayers as fools. CfD contracts are inflation-indexed, so electricity customers will be paying higher prices for their electricity until 2040 and beyond as a consequence of recent inflation. The notion that there has been an unexpected increase in capital costs since bids were submitted last summer is ridiculous, as suppliers have been warning of severe cost pressures for at least 18 months.
The reality is that offshore operators have been submitting unsustainable CfD bids ever since 2017, hoping that something would turn up. Even a period of very high market prices is not enough, so now they want to be bailed out by tax breaks. The Chancellor should just say No.”
Dr John Constable, NZW’s director of energy, said:
“The belief in falling wind power costs is the central foundation of the government’s Net Zero enterprise, and it is demonstrably false. The absurdity of current Net Zero plans is now exposed for all to see.”
Higher carbon dioxide levels do and will continue to act as plant fertilizer and there is no evidence, outside of flawed computer model simulations, that current growing regions will be unable to continue producing coffee.
An article in Nature World News alternately claims climate change has caused or is likely to cause a decline in coffee yields. This is false. Higher carbon dioxide levels do and will continue to act as plant fertilizer and there is no evidence, outside of flawed computer model simulations, that current growing regions will be unable to continue producing coffee.
In the article, “Coffee Farming Yields Down By 50% Due to Rising Temperatures,” author Rich Co can’t get his facts or timeline straight, writing “[a]ccording to experts, rising temperatures are causing a 50% decrease in coffee farming yields.”
Nowhere in the entire story does Co cite or quote a single expert who says climate change has caused a 50 percent decrease in either coffee production or yields. Indeed, since data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) shows a substantial increase in coffee yields and production during the recent period of climate change, it would be surprising if he could find an “expert” who would make such a claim. The FAO’s data shows that between 1991 and 2021:
World coffee production increased by nearly 64 percent, setting new records for production 13 times during that time period, with the most recent record being set in 2020.
World coffee yields display a similar trajectory, having grown by more than 55 percent, setting new records 13 times, once again most recently in 2020. (See the figure, below)
Data prove coffee production has not decreased by 50 percent, or even at all, contrary to Co’s claim. Perhaps what he meant to say is that one set of supposed experts, the increasingly climate obsessed Inter-American Development Bank, claimed: “[b]y 2050, the area suitable for growing coffee will have decreased by up to 50%.”
The projection of a 50 percent decline is based on computer model simulations of future climate trends. Yet, as noted repeatedly at Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, climate models are seriously flawed. The basic projection they make is the global average temperature in response to additional carbon dioxide concentrations, and after more than thirty years and 6 generations of models, the model projections still run too hot.
Modelers then pile their disparate assumptions about how various features of the earth will respond to the flawed temperature projections and assumed CO2 concentrations, referred to as “feedback mechanisms” or “feedback loops,” to produce simulations of what the world will look like 20, 30, 50, and 100 years from now. Model simulations are tested for accuracy against simulations from other models, rather than available data, in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project.
Beginning with bad data, adding untested (in some cases refuted) assumptions about interactions, and testing the output against other models which also use bad data and faulty assumptions is no way to produce trustworthy projections about future climate conditions. It amounts to 30 years of Garbage-In-Garbage-Out or GIGO.
Not only are the Inter-American Development Bank’s claims based on weak computer models, they are refuted by what botany, agronomy, and horticulture tell us about the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and net-plant primary productivity.
Agronomy and Botany explain why crop production and yields have increased amidst global warming, and the same sciences explain why the world should likely expect crop production gains to continue. What’s true for plants in general is equally true for coffee. Modest warming has brought slightly higher rainfall totals, and a modestly longer growing season with fewer crop-killing late-season frosts. In addition, crops are benefitting from higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which any greenhouse operator will tell you is plant fertilizer, contributing to plants growing larger, faster, and using water more efficiently.
Real world data should have informed the claims Co and Nature World News made about links between global warming and current and projected coffee yields, instead of assertions by a few so-called experts at a development bank. Facts refute any claim that climate change is resulting in reduced coffee production or declining yields. Some basic fact checking and copy editing could have resulted in a story that told the good news about coffee production amid modest warming. Nature World News’ readers might have enjoyed that bit of good news as they sipped their first cup of morning joe.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
The Heartland Institute
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