Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The website of American Trucking Associations had an interesting blog post last month concerning electric mandates for the Trucking industry. It is focused on the testimony of Andrew Boyle, ATA first vice chair and co-president of Massachusetts-based Boyle Transportation before a Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on the future of clean vehicles.
The website of American Trucking Associations had an interesting blog post last month concerning electric mandates for the Trucking industry. It is focused on the testimony of Andrew Boyle, ATA first vice chair and co-president of Massachusetts-based Boyle Transportation before a Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on the future of clean vehicles.
A cut from his opening remarks:
Boyle’s testimony demonstrated the disconnects between mandates and the real-world.
From the article.
After one trucking company tried to electrify just 30 trucks at a terminal in Joliet, Illinois, local officials shut those plans down, saying they would draw more electricity than is needed to power the entire city.
A California company tried to electrify 12 forklifts. Not trucks, but forklifts. Local power utilities told them that’s not possible.
Costs, sourcing and reliability are being ignored
Aside from the likely inflation these costs will impose will be issues caused by weight.
It’s not that we can’t overcome challenges, but we don’t overcome them by pretending they don’t exist
California standards will unleash supply chain disruptions nationally.
The order of implementation is important
Bottom line: The trucking industry starts with ‘yes.’ We are committed to protecting the environment and shrinking our footprint, and we have proven that. All we ask for is honesty and transparency about the road ahead. While we share the passion for EVs in cars and light-duty vehicles, projecting an automotive construct onto trucking industry dynamics is a massive mistake.
Success will depend on national standards with achievable targets and realistic timelines that enable innovation to flourish.
All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels. The lack of additional warming is documented in a post Satellite Temps Hit Bottom: February 2023.
The graph shows that coming out of the annual March maximum, April 2023 began 238k km2 lower than the 17 year average. SII even showed extents ~200k km2 lower than MASIE on April 1. However, after two weeks both indices tracked with the average until month end. According to MASIE, the typical April loses 1100 km2, but this year lost only 918k km2. SII shows a loss of only 590k km2 during April. Meanwhile, other years, especially 2007 were losing ice much more rapidly than average.
Why is this important? All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels. The lack of additional warming is documented in a post Satellite Temps Hit Bottom: February 2023.
The table below shows the distribution of Sea Ice across the Arctic Regions, on average, this year and 2007.
Region
2023120
Day 120 Average
2023-Ave.
2007120
2023-2007
(0) Northern_Hemisphere
13446987
13514506
-67519
13108068
338919
(1) Beaufort_Sea
1070966
1067918
3048
1059189
11777
(2) Chukchi_Sea
966006
956111
9895
949246
16760
(3) East_Siberian_Sea
1087137
1085582
1555
1080176
6961
(4) Laptev_Sea
897845
890425
7420
875661
22184
(5) Kara_Sea
933170
912998
20172
864664
68506
(6) Barents_Sea
415992
553986
-137994
396544
19449
(7) Greenland_Sea
761413
648178
113235
644438
116975
(8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence
1123308
1207572
-84264
1147115
-23807
(9) Canadian_Archipelago
854843
848924
5918
838032
16810
(10) Hudson_Bay
1249469
1238384
11085
1222074
27396
(11) Central_Arctic
3239670
3230693
8977
3241034
-1364
(12) Bering_Sea
491550
473366
18184
475489
16061
(13) Baltic_Sea
32086
20744
11342
14684
17402
(14) Sea_of_Okhotsk
321714
376553
-54840
295743
25971
Overall, the extent is slightly below average by 68k km2, or 0.5%. The main deficits are in Barents, Baffin and Okhotsk, partly offset by a surplus in Greenland Sea.
FILE – Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, arrives to speak about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, April 22, 2020, in Washington. Fauci steps down from a five-decade career in public service at the end of the month, one shaped by the HIV pandemic early on and the COVID-19 pandemic at the end. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
“On the field of war what is at stake is the thing that matters most to any man – the saving of his own skin.” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 889
The quote from Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a useful way to begin addressing the Washington Post editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the Post quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.” Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the Post’s editorialists.
That’s the case because “the thing that matters most to any man” is “the saving of his own skin.” That this needs to even be said speaks to how wrongheaded the Post’s editorial board’s approach to the virus was, and still is. It implies we have dead because government didn’t act properly, as though free people eager to live were unequal to a virus that the right kind of collective governmental action was more than equal to. Ok, but what was government going to do? Better yet, what if the virus had struck in 2015 when Barack Obama was still in the White House. What would he have done? Would he have instructed a virus that was spreading faster than the flu to take a “time out”?
The simple truth missed by the Post is that as humans we’re wired to preserve ourselves. On the matter of life and the presumption of death, government is excess. Whatever solution Obama might have come up with, or whatever Donald Trump did come up with, or (try not to laugh) whatever Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would have done if the virus had revealed itself in 2021 would have been vastly unequal to the solutions crafted by free people.
Deep down the Post’s editorialists must know the above is true. Indeed, it’s not that the Soviet Union lacked experts, or that Cuba lacks experts now. The problem was and is that the remarkable knowledge of very few very smart people will never measure up to the collective knowledge of the citizenry. That’s why communism failed so impressively in the Soviet Union, and it’s why it fails in Cuba. Translated for those who need it, the people are the market and markets work. As I make plain in my 2021 book When Politicians Panicked, the problem was experts and politicians substituting their limited knowledge for that of the people. That was the crisis. Not so, according to the Post and the report they cite.
Supposedly the “leaders of the United States could not apply their country’s vast assets effectively enough” such that “1 million died.” Wrong. Over and over again. To see why, imagine if 10 million Americans had died in March of 2020. Can the Post editorial board think of what government might have done that would have somehow improved on a feverish individual desire to survive against long odds? The simple truth glossed over by the Post is that the more threatening a virus is (and the Post seems to view what most didn’t know they were infected with as wildly threatening), the more superfluous government action is.
Really, who reading this ever needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in sickness, or even death? And if the reply to this question is that some people DO need to be forced, you’re making the best case of all for unfettered freedom. Think about it. Those who reject expert opinion are the most crucial “control group” as a virus spreads. By going against the grain, we learn from their freely arrived at actions if the virus is as lethal as presumed, or not, how it spreads, how to perhaps avoid its spread, and all manner of other important bits of information suppressed by one-size-fits-all national solutions.
It cannot be stressed enough that free people crucially produce information. Instead of allowing them to produce it in abundance in 2020, the response arrived at by Democrats and Republicans was to lock people in their homes, thus blinding a nation “with more capabilities than any other country” to the best approaches to a spreading virus. Please keep all of this in mind with the report’s assertion that the “most important and fundamental misjudgment” about the virus was how it spread. You think? Of course, the muscular assertion ignores yet again that if knowing how a virus spreads is of utmost importance, the only credible answer is freedom.
On the matter of the Trump administration, the Post supports the report’s conclusion that “The administration abdicated its wartime responsibilities to lead” only to leave the coronavirus battle to “states and localities.” If only. Back to reality, President Trump signed into law a $2.9 trillion bill that subsidized shutdowns across the country, thus locking people in their homes far longer than would have otherwise happened, and at the expense of untold amounts of economic output. Consider the latter in light of the statement of the obvious that all advances in medicine have always been born of matching doctors and scientists with the abundant fruits of wealth creation. In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post’s editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.
Rather than acknowledge the obvious about government and experts as the crisis, the Post editorialists and the experts they kneel before bemoaned a national abdication of “wartime responsibilities.” One gets the feeling Tolstoy would chuckle yet again. In his words, “The course of a battle is affected by an infinite number of freely operating forces (there being no greater freedom of operation than on a battlefield, where life and death are at stake), and this course can never be known in advance; nor does it ever correspond with the direction of any one particular force.” In short, on matters of life and death government control is wretched, crisis-inducing excess.
University of York PHD Candidate Andrew Macdonald pushing the case for climate extremism.
Climate change protest: a single radical gets more media coverage than thousands of marchers
Published: May 4, 2023 1.18am AEST Andrew Matthew Macdonald PhD Candidate, Climate Activism, University of York
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At the end of April, live on ITV the animal rights protesters Animal Rising delayed the country’s biggest horse race, the Grand National, by 15 minutes. And then two Just Stop Oil (JSO) protesters halted the snooker world championships during a live broadcast on the BBC by dumping orange poster paint over one of the tables.
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Just Stop Oil’s protest led to a spokesperson appearing on GMB, GBNews and Talk TV to promote its cause and call Piers Morgan a “manbaby”. Both groups will probably see these outcomes as a success.
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But what media coverage can peaceful protest generate? Just a few days later we had a chance to find out.
From April 21 to 24, Extinction Rebellion (XR) held four days of peaceful protest in central London attracting an estimated 60,000 people. The so-called Big Onewas XR’s first mass protest since the group announced a few months ago it was pausing disruptive protests.
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But it’s not clear that Extinction Rebellion’s new approach actually worked. Certainly if the idea was to attract more or better headlines, the results seem underwhelming.
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In my research, young activists often mention the Swedish academic Andreas Malm and his book How To Blow Up A Pipeline, a provocative polemic that has now been adapted into a fictional ecological thriller with climate saboteurs as the “goodies”.
It is the knowledge they are losing the battle for hearts and minds which is what is driving radical greens to ever more frantic attempts to grab public attention. In the very near future they will be completely isolated – attention is already shifting to the next great fake crisis, the threat of malevolent AI.
One day soon, in the not too distant future, we will look on green radicals as just another kind of quirky survivalist, just another bunch of frightened people holed up in their bunkers, wasting their lives away waiting for the apocalypse which never arrives.
“What a banker,” read the unsubtle headline in the Sun. “BoE official on £190k salary says Brits must accept they’re worse off.” The Mail agreed. “BoE chief risks fury as he says Brits must accept they are poorer.”
“What a banker,” read the unsubtle headline in the Sun. “BoE official on £190k salary says Brits must accept they’re worse off.” The Mail agreed. “BoE chief risks fury as he says Brits must accept they are poorer.” What sparked the tabloids’ outrage was a Columbia Law School podcast with Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist and a member of the Bank’s interest-rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee. Pill made the uncontroversial point that higher energy prices were making Britons worse off, but that attempts by workers and firms to recoup the real spending power they’d lost risked embedding inflation.
Pill had made a similar case in a speech in Geneva earlier this month. For an energy importer like the UK, the rise in natural gas prices represented a substantial deterioration in Britain’s terms of trade, making the average UK resident worse off. Firms and households will seek to pass on those higher costs to their customers and their employers. But at the aggregate level, “attempts to shift the unavoidable cost to someone else are self-defeating,” Pill argued. “All they achieve is to create additional nominal demand pressures that ultimately will create inflation and endanger the achievement of the inflation target.”
Pill’s mistake is not his analysis but his directing these comments to the wrong audience. Attempts by politicians to talk down inflation in the 1970s ended up making those who said them objects of ridicule. “My fellow Americans,” President Ford told Congress in his October 1974 Whip Inflation Now speech, “ten days ago I asked you to get things started by making a list of 10 ways to fight inflation and save energy, to exchange your list with your neighbors, and to send me a copy.” It is rational for economic actors to use their market power to attempt to deflect rising costs onto others. No amount of speechifying will change that. Resulting wage-price spirals are not their fault; the culpability falls on those who misjudged the persistence of inflation pressure. It’s no surprise, therefore, that Pill’s remarks garnered hostile headlines.
Pill’s analysis should have been directed at his fellow central bankers, who let inflation slip the leash. In his Geneva speech, Pill says that central bankers need to assess structural factors likely to prevent inflation falling back to target. “If a rise in energy prices is seen as permanent, it is more likely to trigger greater intrinsic inflation,” he argues. If it does, it would “justify a stronger tightening of monetary policy.” Not mentioned by Pill, however, are the effects of climate policy and net zero on energy costs and prices – and therefore the persistence of inflation on an economy being subjected to a multi-decadal program of decarbonization.
Climate policies drive up energy costs through two channels. The first are policies forcing energy companies to replace hydrocarbons with inefficient, inferior lower-carbon alternatives, notably wind and solar. Were such technologies superior and capable of delivering greater efficiencies, there would be no need for government intervention promoting their adoption. The second channel is by progressively constricting the sources of energy supply, for example by Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investors preventing investment in new oil and gas fields, thereby increasing the market share of OPEC plus Russia.
In Britain’s case, powering past coal meant increased dependence on natural gas to keep the lights on. As Pill notes, all market transactions involve distribution of some “economic surplus” between the parties; “the more effective the seller is in extracting that economic surplus, the higher the resulting economic price will be.” Unfortunately for Britain and the rest of Europe, Vladmir Putin and Gazprom have a much better understanding of how energy markets work than Western politicians who made their continent vulnerable to surplus extraction through the myopic pursuit of net zero.
With the Bank of England, it’s not so much myopia as wilful blindness to any possibility of a link between climate policies and inflation. In a speech this month unironically asking “Climate action: a tipping point?,” Sarah Breeden, the bank’s executive director for financial stability and risk, describes its role as creating a regulatory framework that encourages markets “to allocate capital to support real economy decarbonization,” i.e., to worsen the supply constraints on hydrocarbon energy. At the November 2022 G20 meeting in Bali, Deputy Governor Sir Dave Ramsden spoke of the need to avert climate catastrophe. “Among all the shocks – many unprecedented – facing the global economy today, the challenge of climate change is the most profound and far reaching,” Sir Dave declared, in the very month it was announced that consumer price inflation in Britain had reached 11.1 percent.
From the governor on down, the Bank of England became obsessed with conjuring up specters of climate risk as threats to financial stability, all the while blanking out any possibility that climate change policy might threaten attainment of the bank’s inflation mandate. Less than two years ago, Andrew Bailey, the bank’s governor, was talking of net zero as a way of regenerating capital and raising productivity. “These positive effects should be larger in countries like the UK that are net importers of energy,” Bailey asserted – the opposite of what the bank’s chief economist is now saying.
Alarm bells should be ringing in Threadneedle Street. Giving evidence to a House of Lords inquiry on the Bank of England independence, former chancellor George Osborne cast doubt on making climate goals one of the bank’s objectives. His former Labour opponent, Ed Balls, who helped design the arrangements making the bank independent in 1997, went further, arguing that it didn’t make sense to give the bank a role for which it had no tools, and suggesting that climate had become a distraction from its core mission on price and financial stability. Climate is worse than a distraction: misjudgement and misanalysis of climate-change policy is a key factor in the Bank of England losing control of inflation.
If, as you read these words, you feel your blood pressure rising and the vessels in your neck pulsating with rage, then congratulations, your reaction is appropriate. You are clearly immune to the dark art of modern sophistry and rest assured, your critical thought processes are finely tuned.
Is there a readily available and simple diagnostic test to confirm ones credentials as a critical thinker? Something you can shove up your nose, send to a lab somewhere and wait for your phone to ping.
Perhaps not, but in Westminster Hall on April 17th, approximately 1 hour 40 minutes into the WHO Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness Parliamentary debate, we were gifted with the perfect assessment tool.
To take the test, read this short passage, courtesy of the member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Labour/Co-operative Party), Preet Kaur Gill:
Climate change and globalisation mean that natural biological threats are becoming more common… The lesson of the pandemic was that no one is safe until everyone is safe, and that global health is local health, so global co-operation on pandemic preparedness and biological threats clearly needs to be strengthened. That is why the Opposition absolutely supports the principle of a legally binding WHO treaty.
If, as you read these words, you feel your blood pressure rising and the vessels in your neck pulsating with rage, then congratulations, your reaction is appropriate. You are clearly immune to the dark art of modern sophistry and rest assured, your critical thought processes are finely tuned.
If, on the other hand, her words reassure you, reconfirm your faith in humanity and fill you with a warm fuzzy feeling, then sadly you have succumbed to the propaganda; you may be a lost cause.
Those who fail to elicit a strong response may be forgiven for questioning the test’s validity. They may perceive the passage as banal or idle rhetoric, innocently drafted figurative speech that washes over you harmlessly. But make no mistake, these words are pernicious and carefully crafted to achieve a specific outcome. What we are being exposed to here are the new variants of political sophistry, engineered to seem superficially plausible, but they are incorrect and aim to deceive you. Put on your double-thinking cap, because now you must accept that “global health is local health” and “climate change and globalisation mean that natural biological threats are becoming more common”. These statements are at odds with the facts.
First UNICEF, followed by GAVI, the WHO, the UN, the Council of Europe, the BMJ, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Save the Children and now the Labour Party have all told you: “No one is safe until everyone is safe.” This slogan is designed to garner ideals of equity and togetherness and induce a warm, fuzzy feeling whilst in actual fact it is cold and calculating. The ultimate purpose of this slogan is to diminish the range of your thought and to perpetuate the state of emergency. Its teaching is a top-down imposition with no grounding in reality, amplified with mantra-like repetition by many (seemingly) independent voices until it is no longer questioned by the masses. This is an insidious form of indoctrination.
The techniques employed by these sloganeers are not new and echo those of totalitarian regimes. Unless we are able to comprehend the power of this manipulation then we cannot safeguard ourselves from the danger that it poses.
In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist…
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The slogans of the ‘One Health’ propaganda merging pandemic and climate emergencies now crop up everywhere. Here is Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance and Chair of the UN IPBES workshop on ‘Escaping the “Era of Pandemics’“:
There is no great mystery about the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic – or of any modern pandemic. The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment… This is the path to pandemics.
And listen to the people at the Health and Environmental Alliance (generously funded by the EU) describing the science of the ‘One Health’ philosophy:
The impacts of climate change on human health are not limited to the increase in average temperatures and the melting of glaciers. Climate change is also the cause behind human and animal migration, the increase in extreme weather events, the emergence and spread of vector-borne and waterborne infectious diseases, and rises in allergens, air, water and food pollution.
Denying climate change is akin to blasphemy and with the conflation of climate and pandemic policy, the legally binding terms of the pandemic treaty will become unquestionable. ‘One Health’ is the amalgamation of two disparate perceived threats: climate change and pandemics. Like sharks combined with tornados, ‘One Health’ is a fictional creation and just like the ‘Sharknado‘, it belongs in a B movie, not in the real world.
Shiraz Akram is a member of the Thinking Coalition, a pro-liberty group, highlighting and questioning Government overreach.
North Atlantic is a Climate Driver
The importance of this basin is described by Börgel et al. (2020) The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation controls the impact of the North Atlantic Oscillation on North European climate. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
A continuing theme of this blog is Oceans Make Climate, coined by Dr. Arnd Bernaerts. He further explained: ” Climate is the continuation of ocean by other means.” The focus of this post is the North Atlantic which directly impacts weather and climate experienced by the populated continents of Europe and North America.
European climate is heavily influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). However, the spatial structure of the NAO is varying with time, affecting its regional importance. By analyzing an 850-year global climate model simulation of the last millennium it is shown that the variations in the spatial structure of the NAO can be linked to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). The AMO changes the zonal position of the NAO centers of action, moving them closer to Europe or North America. During AMO+ states, the Icelandic Low moves further towards North America while the Azores High moves further towards Europe and vice versa for AMO- states. The results of a regional downscaling for the East Atlantic/European domain show that AMO-induced changes in the spatial structure of the NAO reduce or enhance its influence on regional climate variables of the Baltic Sea such as sea surface temperature, ice extent, or river runoff.
Natural Factors Operating in N. Atlantic
The main mechanisms operating in this basin are defined as follows:
AMO (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) refers to the phase changes of N. Atlantic SSTs (Sea Surface Temperatures). There is also the AMOC (Atlantic Multidecadal Overturning Oscillation) referring to the oceanic “conveyer belt” transporting water between the warm tropics and the cold poles. The NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) is the air pressure dipole alternating highs and lows between the Azores and Iceland.
Several studies examine cycle periods and the interactions between the three major climate modes over the North Atlantic, namely the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO), and the North Atlantic oscillation (NAO). Here, we use a relatively novel high-resolution lead–lag (LL) method to identify short time windows with persistent LL relations in the three series during the period from 1947 to 2020. We find that there are roughly 20-year time windows where LL relations change direction at both interannual, high-frequency and multidecadal, low-frequency timescales. However, with varying LL strength, the AMO leads AMOC for the full period at the interannual timescale. During the period from 1980 to 2000, we had the sequence NAO→AMO→AMOC→NAO at the interannual timescale. For the full period in the decadal time scale, we obtain NAO→AMO→AMOC. The Ekman variability closely follows the NAO variability. Both single time series and the LL relation between pairs of series show pseudo-oscillating patterns with cycle periods of about 20 years. We list possible mechanisms that contribute to the cyclic behavior, but no conclusive evidence has yet been found.
Figure 2.AMOC, AMO and NAO. (a) Time series raw and LOESS(0.3)-smoothed. The detrendedand LOESS(0.3)-smoothed versions of AMOC shifts sign from starting with (+) in 1947, then 1969,1997, 2010. AMO starting from (+) in 1947, 1996, 1999. NAO starting from (+) in 1947, 1952, 1972,1997, 2014, 2020.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find only the Hadsst AMO dataset has Feb. and March data. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “Hadsst AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The AMO index as defined as the SST averaged over 0°-60°N, 0°-80°W minus SST averaged over 60°S-60°N.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its varibility, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 is starting out slightly warm.
The background post below provides more detail on AMO and AMOC measuring systems, but there is a growing concern that funding for oceanic data is being reduced or cut off. For example this report from Srokosz et al. (2020):
Despite the tremendous progress in AMOC-related research as articulated in the Special Issue manuscripts, there are many remaining challenges that should be addressed to further our understanding. From the observational side, such challenges include gaps in the observing system (e.g., shelf regions and deep oceans), disparate observational strategies, and reductions in funding that jeopardize sustained observations (Frajka-Williams et al., 2019; McCarthy et al., 2020). Earth system models continue to show persistent biases, particularly in the North Atlantic, and AMOC variability mechanisms and their characteristics vary significantly across models (e.g., Danabasoglu et al., 2019; Zhang et al., 2019).
Although the US AMOC Program formally “sunsets” in 2021, research on the AMOC in the United States will continue. The original motivation for AMOC observations, the possibility of AMOC decline or rapid collapse under anthropogenically induced climate change, remains. The latest IPCC special report on the ocean and cryosphere (Pörtner et al., 2019) states that “Observations, both in situ (2004–2017) and based on sea surface temperature reconstructions, indicate that the AMOC has weakened relative to 1850–1900 (medium confidence),” and that “The AMOC is projected to weaken in the 21st century under all RCPs (very likely), although a collapse is very unlikely (medium confidence).” These conclusions and the above challenges present new opportunities and motivations for the community. Specifically, collaborative research that includes a hierarchy of models, theory, high-resolution paleo records, and sustained and processed-based observations promises to advance our understanding, potentially leading to improved models and prediction skills, among others, of AMOC variability and its associated climate impacts.
Comment: It seems that data showing errors in the climate models, or failing to support climate alarm, will disappear when funding is withdrawn.
Summary: An international study reveals the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which helps regulate Earth’s climate, is highly variable and primarily driven by the conversion of warm, salty, shallow waters into colder, fresher, deep waters moving south through the Irminger and Iceland basins. This upends prevailing ideas and may help scientists better predict Arctic ice melt and future changes in the ocean’s ability to mitigate climate change by storing excess atmospheric carbon.
New research shows the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, which regulates climate, is primarily driven by waters west of Europe. Credit: Carolina Nobre, WHOI Media
In a departure from the prevailing scientific view, the study shows that most of the overturning and variability is occurring not in the Labrador Sea off Canada, as past modeling studies have suggested, but in regions between Greenland and Scotland. There, warm, salty, shallow waters carried northward from the tropics by currents and wind, sink and convert into colder, fresher, deep waters moving southward through the Irminger and Iceland basins.
Overturning variability in this eastern section of the ocean was seven times greater than in the Labrador Sea, and it accounted for 88 percent of the total variance documented across the entire North Atlantic over the 21-month study period.
“Overturning carries vast amounts of anthropogenic carbon deep into the ocean, helping to slow global warming,” said co-author Penny Holliday of the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, U.K. “The largest reservoir of this anthropogenic carbon is in the North Atlantic.”
“Overturning also transports tropical heat northward,” Holliday said, “meaning any changes to it could have an impact on glaciers and Arctic sea ice. Understanding what is happening, and what may happen in the years to come, is vital.”
MIT’s Carl Wunsch and other outside experts said the study was helpful, but pointed out that 21 months of study is not enough to know if this different location is temporary or permanent.
[Note: The comment about oceans taking up CO2 could be misleading. The ocean contains dissolved CO2 amounting to 50 times atmospheric CO2. Each year about 20% of all CO2 in the air goes into the ocean, replaced by outgassing CO2. The tiny fraction of atmospheric CO2 from humans is exchanged proportionately. Henry’s law applies to the water/air interface, so that a warmer ocean absorbs slightly less, and a colder ocean absorbs slightly more CO2. The exchange equilibrium is hardly disturbed by the little bit of human produced CO2. Thus the ocean serves as a massive buffer against human emissions.]
Previous Post: AMOC 2018: Not Showing Climate Threat
The RAPID moorings being deployed. Credit: National Oceanography Centre.
The AMOC is back in the news following a recent Ocean Sciences meeting. This update adds to the theme Oceans Make Climate. Background links are at the end, including one where chief alarmist M. Mann claims fossil fuel use will stop the ocean conveyor belt and bring a new ice age. Actual scientists are working away methodically on this part of the climate system, and are more level-headed. H/T GWPF for noticing the recent article in Science Ocean array alters view of Atlantic ‘conveyor belt’ By Katherine Kornei Feb. 17, 2018 . Excerpts with my bolds.
The powerful currents in the Atlantic, formally known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), are a major engine in Earth’s climate. The AMOC’s shallower limbs—which include the Gulf Stream—transport warm water from the tropics northward, warming Western Europe. In the north, the waters cool and sink, forming deeper limbs that transport the cold water back south—and sequester anthropogenic carbon in the process. This overturning is why the AMOC is sometimes called the Atlantic conveyor belt.
Fig. 1. Schematic of the major warm (red to yellow) and cold (blue to purple) water pathways in the NASPG (North Atlantic subpolar gyre ) credit: H. Furey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution): Denmark Strait (DS), Faroe Bank Channel (FBC), East and West Greenland Currents (EGC and WGC, respectively), NAC, DSO, and ISO.
Last week, at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU’s) Ocean Sciences meeting here, scientists presented the first data from an array of instruments moored in the subpolar North Atlantic. The observations reveal unexpected eddies and strong variability in the AMOC currents. They also show that the currents east of Greenland contribute the most to the total AMOC flow. Climate models, on the other hand, have emphasized the currents west of Greenland in the Labrador Sea. “We’re showing the shortcomings of climate models,” says Susan Lozier, a physical oceanographer at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who leads the $35-million, seven-nation project known as the Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP).
Fig. 2. Schematic of the OSNAP array. The vertical black lines denote the OSNAP moorings with the red dots denoting instrumentation at depth. The thin gray lines indicate the glider survey. The red arrows show pathways for the warm and salty waters of subtropical origin; the light blue arrows show the pathways for the fresh and cold surface waters of polar origin; and the dark blue arrows show the pathways at depth for waters that originate in the high-latitude North Atlantic and Arctic.
For decades oceanographers have assumed the AMOC to be highly susceptible to changes in the production of deep waters at high latitudes in the North Atlantic. A new ocean observing system is now in place that will test that assumption. Early results from the OSNAP observational program reveal the complexity of the velocity field across the section and the dramatic increase in convective activity during the 2014/15 winter. Early results from the gliders that survey the eastern portion of the OSNAP line have illustrated the importance of these measurements for estimating meridional heat fluxes and for studying the evolution of Subpolar Mode Waters. Finally, numerical modeling data have been used to demonstrate the efficacy of a proxy AMOC measure based on a broader set of observational data, and an adjoint modeling approach has shown that measurements in the OSNAP region will aid our mechanistic understanding of the low-frequency variability of the AMOC in the subtropical North Atlantic.
Fig. 7. (a) Winter [Dec–Mar (DJFM)] mean NAO index. Time series of temperature from the (b) K1 and (c) K9 moorings.
Finally, we note that while a primary motivation for studying AMOC variability comes from its potential impact on the climate system, as mentioned above, additional motivation for the measure of the heat, mass, and freshwater fluxes in the subpolar North Atlantic arises from their potential impact on marine biogeochemistry and the cryosphere. Thus, we hope that this observing system can serve the interests of the broader climate community.
Fig. 10. Linear sensitivity of the AMOC at (d),(e) 25°N and (b),(c) 50°N in Jan to surface heat flux anomalies per unit area. Positive sensitivity indicates that ocean cooling leads to an increased AMOC—e.g., in the upper panels, a unit increase in heat flux out of the ocean at a given location will change the AMOC at (d) 25°N or (e) 50°N 3 yr later by the amount shown in the color bar. The contour intervals are logarithmic. (a) The time series show linear sensitivity of the AMOC at 25°N (blue) and 50°N (green) to heat fluxes integrated over the subpolar gyre (black box with surface area of ∼6.7 × 10 m2) as a function of forcing lead time. The reader is referred to Pillar et al. (2016) for model details and to Heimbach et al. (2011) and Pillar et al. (2016) for a full description of the methodology and discussion relating to the dynamical interpretation of the sensitivity distributions.
In summary, while modeling studies have suggested a linkage between deep-water mass formation and AMOC variability,observations to date have been spatially or temporally compromised and therefore insufficient either to support or to rule out this connection.
Current observational efforts to assess AMOC variability in the North Atlantic.
The U.K.–U.S. Rapid Climate Change–Meridional Overturning Circulation and Heatflux Array (RAPID–MOCHA) program at 26°N successfully measures the AMOC in the subtropical North Atlantic via a transbasin observing system (Cunningham et al. 2007; Kanzow et al. 2007; McCarthy et al. 2015). While this array has fundamentally altered the community’s view of the AMOC, modeling studies over the past few years have suggested that AMOC fluctuations on interannual time scales are coherent only over limited meridional distances. In particular, a break point in coherence may occur at the subpolar–subtropical gyre boundary in the North Atlantic (Bingham et al. 2007; Baehr et al. 2009). Furthermore, a recent modeling study has suggested that the low-frequency variability of the RAPID–MOCHA appears to be an integrated response to buoyancy forcing over the subpolar gyre (Pillar et al. 2016). Thus, a measure of the overturning in the subpolar basin contemporaneous with a measure of the buoyancy forcing in that basin likely offers the best possibility of understanding the mechanisms that underpin AMOC variability. Finally, though it might be expected that the plethora of measurements from the North Atlantic would be sufficient to constrain a measure of the AMOC within the context of an ocean general circulation model, recent studies (Cunningham and Marsh 2010; Karspeck et al. 2015) reveal that there is currently no consensus on the strength or variability of the AMOC in assimilation/reanalysis products.
Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Red colours indicate warm, shallow currents and blue colours indicate cold, deep return flows. Modified from Church, 2007, A change in circulation? Science, 317(5840), 908–909. doi:10.1126/science.1147796
12-hourly, 10-day low pass filtered transport timeseries from April 2nd 2004 to February 2017.
Figure 1: Ten-day (colours) and three month (black) low-pass filtered timeseries of Florida Straits transport (blue), Ekman transport (green), upper mid-ocean transport (magenta), and overturning transport (red) for the period 2nd April 2004 to end- February 2017. Florida Straits transport is based on electromagnetic cable measurements; Ekman transport is based on ERA winds. The upper mid-ocean transport, based on the RAPID mooring data, is the vertical integral of the transport per unit depth down to the deepest northward velocity (~1100 m) on each day. Overturning transport is then the sum of the Florida Straits, Ekman, and upper mid-ocean transports and represents the maximum northward transport of upper-layer waters on each day. Positive transports correspond to northward flow.
The RAPID/MOCHA/WBTS array (hereinafter referred to as the RAPID array) has revolutionized basin scale oceanography by supplying continuous estimates of the meridional overturning transport (McCarthy et al., 2015), and the associated basin-wide transports of heat (Johns et al., 2011) and freshwater (McDonagh et al., 2015) at 10-day temporal resolution. These estimates have been used in a wide variety of studies characterizing temporal variability of the North Atlantic Ocean, for instance establishing a decline in the AMOC between 2004 and 2013.
Summary from RAPID data analysis
MCCIP reported in 2006 that:
a 30% decline in the AMOC has been observed since the early 1990s based on a limited number of observations. There is a lack of certainty and consensus concerning the trend;
most climate models anticipate some reduction in strength of the AMOC over the 21st century due to increased freshwater influence in high latitudes. The IPCC project a slowdown in the overturning circulation rather than a dramatic collapse.
And in 2017 that:
a substantial increase in the observations available to estimate the strength of the AMOC indicate, with greater certainty, a decline since the mid 2000s;
the AMOC is still expected to decline throughout the 21st century in response to a changing climate. If and when a collapse in the AMOC is possible is still open to debate, but it is not thought likely to happen this century.
And also that:
a high level of variability in the AMOC strength has been observed, and short term fluctuations have had unexpected impacts, including severe winters and abrupt sea-level rise;
recent changes in the AMOC may be driving the cooling of Atlantic ocean surface waters which could lead to drier summers in the UK.
Conclusions
The AMOC is key to maintaining the mild climate of the UK and Europe.
The AMOC is predicted to decline in the 21st century in response to a changing climate.
Past abrupt changes in the AMOC have had dramatic climate consequences.
There is growing evidence that the AMOC has been declining for at least a decade, pushing the Atlantic Multidecadal Variability into a cool phase.
Short term fluctuations in the AMOC have proved to have unexpected impacts, including being linked with severe winters and abrupt sea-level rise.
New York State recently banned the use of natural gas from most new buildings that was described as: “a major win for climate advocates, but a move that could spark pushback from fossil fuel interests”.
New York State recently banned the use of natural gas from most new buildings that was described as: “a major win for climate advocates, but a move that could spark pushback from fossil fuel interests”. I have been following New York’s net-zero transition plan for years and there are some interesting aspects associated with the “major win for climate advocates”.
Climate Act Background
The Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050 and an interim 2030 target of a 40% reduction by 2030. The Climate Action Council is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.” In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible and power the electric gride with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040. The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies. That material was used to write a Draft Scoping Plan. After a year-long review the Scoping Plan recommendations were finalized at the end of 2022. In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations are supposed to be implemented through regulation and legislation
New York’s official website for the Climate Act promotes the strategies in the Scoping Plan including a fact sheet describing the plans to decarbonize New York’s buildings. It includes the following:
Adopt Zero-Emission Codes and Standards: More efficient, zero-emissions equipment for heating and cooking is increasingly available. That makes replacing existing equipment and appliances with cleaner and healthier alternatives an easy choice for New Yorkers. New construction projects will be required to install zero-emissions equipment in 2025 for single-family and low-rise buildings and in 2028 for high-rise and commercial buildings.
The Scoping Plan includes specific recommended strategies for the buildings sector. The relevant theme, “Adopt Zero-Emission Codes and Standards and Require Energy Benchmarking for Buildings”, included three strategies:
B1. Adopt Advanced Codes for Highly Efficient, Zero-Emission, and Resilient New Construction
B2. Adopt Standards for Zero-Emission Equipment and the Energy Performance of Existing Buildings
B3. Require Energy Benchmarking and Disclosure
The text states:
In existing buildings, the best opportunity for energy improvements is during routine home and capital improvements and when HVAC equipment is retired from service. Since the useful life of HVAC equipment ranges from 15 to 30 years, seizing the opportunities to electrify
buildings by 2050 requires near-term action.
Electrification and efficiency improvements in existing buildings present a larger challenge of sheer scale. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), DEC, and New York State Department of State (DOS) should work together to adopt regulatory requirements that will bring about the end of fossil fuel combustion in buildings by prohibiting replacement of fossil fuel equipment at end of useful life, coordinated with action taken by the PSC and New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) to regulate gas utilities and with New York State Department of Labor (DOL) and the Office of Just Transition to promote workforce development. Building performance standards also will compel efficient operation of buildings and capital investments in high-performance building envelopes and efficient HVAC systems.
New York Legislation
As noted previously the plan for 2023 is to promulgate new regulations and pass new legislation to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations. New York’s strange political process includes an annual legislative self-made crisis in which legislation is held hostage to the annual budget. On May 2, over a month past the April 1 due date, the Legislature and Administration finally passed the budget bill that included the gas stove ban that got so much attention. The point of this article is that there were interesting aspects of the budget discussions this year that have bigger implications than the passage of the ban.
In my opinion, and certainly the belief of the climate activists, the Scoping Plan is pretty clear that fossil-fueled equipment is to be banned outright. Indeed, the legislation prohibits installation of “fossil-fuel equipment and building systems” in newly constructed buildings seven stories or less, except new commercial or industrial buildings over 100,000 ft2 on or after 12/31/25, and for all other buildings on or after 12/31/28”. However, the prohibition does not apply to
The repair, alteration, addition, relocation, or other changes to pre-existing buildings
The fossil-fuel prohibition shall exempt equipment and systems used for emergency back-up power and standby power; manufactured homes, and building used as a manufacturing facility, commercial food establishment, laboratory, car wash, laundromat, hospital, other medical facility, critical infrastructure, agricultural building, fuel cell system, or crematorium.
To the “fullest extent feasible”, fossil-fuel equipment and building systems in such buildings are to be limited to areas where a prohibition is infeasible, and such areas must be “electrification ready”, except for those serving manufacturing or industrial processes. Emissions from allowed use must be minimized. “Financial considerations shall not be sufficient basis to determine physical or technical infeasibility.”
The Energy Code shall exempt new building construction that requires new or expanded electric service, pursuant to §31.1 of the Public Service Law, when electric service cannot be reasonably provided by the grid.
When the ban on natural gas in new construction was first announced there was intense pushback. Apologists and the Governor were quick to point out that the ban only affected new construction and that nobody was coming to take away existing natural gas appliances. However, the Scoping Plan recommendations make it clear that the plan is to eventually ban the replacement of most existing fossil-fired infrastructure. Furthermore, the original language did not include all the caveats that ended up in the final bill described above. I interpret that to mean that the reality is that accommodations have to be made to pass Climate Act implementing legislation.
Emissions Accounting
The New York political theater starts with the Governor’s State of the State address in early January that outlines her legislative agenda for the year. This is followed by specific legislative proposals from the Administration, Senate, and Assembly. This year the initial budget bills from the Governor, Senate and Assembly included significant policy aspects related to the Climate Act that did not get included in the final budget bill but the debates are instructive.
For example, sometime during this process there was a revelation that prompted a specific legislative proposal to modify the emissions accounting because of excessive costs. Climate Action Council co-chairs Doreen Harris and Basil Seggos explained that::
“First and foremost, the governor is trying to maintain New York’s leadership on climate. It’s a core principle that she brought into office and we have been carrying that out for several years,” said Seggos.
But Gov. Hochul instructed both the DEC and NYSERDA to look at the affordability of Cap & Invest.
“We began running the numbers on that, based on some of the metrics being used by Washington state and some of our own, and revealed some…potentially extraordinary costs affiliated with the program,” Seggos explained. “So that’s really what this is. It isn’t a focus necessarily on methane itself, or any particular pollutant. It is how do we implement the CLCPA in a way that doesn’t put extraordinary costs on the pockets of New Yorkers.”
It seems astounding to me but it does appear that someone in the Administration finally started really looking at the potential costs of the Climate Act. When the first auction of allowances for the Washington state program produced costs higher than expected, DEC and NYSERDA ran the numbers and the results were a reality slap to the Administration. The response was to propose a change to the unique emissions accounting scheme used in the Climate Act.
In order to maximize the purported harm of natural gas use the Climate Act specified the use of global warming potential over 20 years rather than over 100 years as used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United States government, and every other jurisdiction (since its implementation the state of Maryland has also begun to specify GWP-20). The result is that the number of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are increased and when that emission total was multiplied by the closing price of the Washington state auction the result was “extraordinary costs”.
In one word the response by climate activists to this legislation was “meltdown”. For example, NY Renews, a coalition of over 300 environmental, justice, faith, labor, and community groups that bills itself as the “force behind the nation’s most progressive climate law” had this to say:
S6030/A6039 is part of a larger pattern of attacks by the fossil fuel industry that threaten to sabotage New York’s nation-leading climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and roll back hard-won standards for accurately accounting for the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane. If passed, the bill would change how the state measures methane and carbon dioxide emissions, pave the way for polluting corporations to emit without consequence, and harm the health and well-being of frontline community members who live, work, play, and pray in neighborhoods across NYS.
NY Renews unequivocally opposes the inclusion of this bill in the state budget and any deal that would include it. We’re calling on the state legislature to uphold the Climate Act as written into law and reject amendments that would threaten its power to protect and prepare New Yorkers facing the worst effects of the climate crisis.
In response to the outcry the Administration backed down from the proposal. They claimed that it distracted from the importance of passing the budget bill. Nonetheless, Seggos said “The fundamental takeaway is it’s full steam ahead for cap and invest with the climate action rebate and any other elements we’ll take up as soon as we can.”
Discussion
The reason that I am encouraged rather than discouraged by the enacted gas appliance ban on new construction is that a couple of issues came up that will have to be addressed. The political approach to punt difficult problems down the road can only work so long.
The initial blowback to the gas stove ban prompted the Administration to propose legislation that gradually eliminates fossil fuel-burning heating equipment from nearly all New York buildings, consistent with the Climate Action Council plan, but takes less aggressive steps to reduce the use of gas stoves. The proposed changes:
Dec. 31, 2025: Prohibit all equipment (including stoves) that burn fossil fuels in new construction of single-family homes or apartment buildings of three stories or less.
Dec. 31, 2028: Prohibit all fossil fuel-burning equipment (including stoves) in new construction of commercial buildings and multifamily structures of four stories or more.
Jan. 1, 2030: Prohibit installation of heating or hot water equipment (but not stoves) in any single-family home or apartment building of three stories or less.
Jan. 1, 2035: Prohibit installation of fossil fuel heating or hot water systems (but not stoves) in any commercial building or larger multifamily structure.
The final legislation only addressed the first two components. The Administration apparently hopes that the Scoping Plan recommendation to mandate electrification when existing fossil-fired appliances reach their end of life can be made palatable if gas stoves are exempted. I think that is naïve because so many people appreciate the resiliency and capabilities of fossil-fueled furnaces and hot water heaters too. When the legislation to implement a prohibit in-kind replacement of existing appliances comes up, I believe there will be intense blowback.
The final budget bill also included legislation for distribution of the proceeds from a cap and invest auction. I don’t see an easy path for the Administration to walk back their statements that the auction will result in extraordinary costs. They are on record saying the costs are unacceptable so how do they reconcile that?
NYT: “No One Is Coming for Your Gas Stove Anytime Soon”
Time: “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars”
Salon: “Rumors of a gas stove ban ignite a right-wing culture war”
MSNBC: “No, the woke mob is not coming for your gas stove.”
AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves”
The Washington Post: “GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars”
However, New York’s Climate Act implementation demonstrates that a net-zero transition requires such a ban. It is not going to be possible to put off a debate about personal choice options and the advantages of fossil fuel for residential use because the New Yorkers who are blissfully unaware of this aspect of the Climate Act will demand to be heard.
The other aspect of this relates to the cap and invest program and the costs of the program. The Hochul Administration narrative is that the costs of inaction for the net zero Climate Act transition outweigh the costs of action but that statement is misleading unless they issue a caveat that the costs in the Scoping Plan do not include the costs of “already implemented” programs. My analyses of costs have found that there are other significant “already implemented” program costs (for example the costs of transportation electrification) and that means that the Administration claim does not include all the costs to transition to net-zero. It gets worse because as far as I can tell the Integration Analysis does include the benefits of already implemented programs while it excludes the costs. In order to get the desired result, the State analyses have a thumb pressing down on one side of the scale and the other thumb is pushing up the other side of the scale. I don’t see how the Administration can avoid a meaningful discussion of the costs that they admit are extraordinary.
CNN described the New York State ban on the use of natural gas from most new buildings as “a major win for climate advocates, but a move that could spark pushback from fossil fuel interests”. Advocates refuse to acknowledge the possibility that fossil fuel interests could align with the interests of the majority of New Yorkers who appreciate and value the resiliency and affordability of our existing fossil-fueled infrastructure. The proposed wholesale shift to unwanted technology without proper accounting of costs will be under intense scrutiny this year. I do not see how the Hochul Administration can avoid an open debate about the implications of the Climate Act for all New Yorkers.
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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. More details on the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act are available here. He has written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition because he believes the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.
In Norway, resistance to sharing electricity with Germany is growing, although Economy Minister Habeck made a deal in January for a hydrogen pipeline between the two countries to produce electricity. The Norwegians argue that the generated wind power is exclusively for their country and they do not want to share it. A spokesman emphasized that it was “their wind”
In Norway, resistance to sharing electricity with Germany is growing, although Economy Minister Habeck made a deal in January for a hydrogen pipeline between the two countries to produce electricity. The Norwegians argue that the generated wind power is exclusively for their country and they do not want to share it. A spokesman emphasized that it was “their wind” (Berliner-Zeitung: 02.05.23).
Norway as Europe’s leading oil and gas producer: Resistance to energy supplies to Germany grows
According to the Norwegian Chamber of Commerce (AHK), the Scandinavian country produced an impressive 2022 million standard cubic meters of oil and gas in 232, making it the leading producer in the European Economic Area. Norway has abundant fossil mineral resources, but also ideal conditions for the production of green electricity and green hydrogen. In view of this, it seems obvious that Norway would give up a piece of the pie. However, there seems to be growing resistance among Norwegians to their role as Germany’s number one energy supplier, while Germans would like to stick to the existing partnership.
Norway has one of the highest per capita electricity consumption in the world with almost 22,400 kilowatt hours (kWh), while people in Germany consume less than 6,700 kWh per capita, according to the Energy & Climate Protection Foundation. Although Norway has electricity surpluses and was also cheaper in the past, the high consumption is now no longer justifiable. The head of analysis and consulting firm Rystad Energy, Jarand Rystad, explained that many people think there is more than enough electricity to meet their own needs, but that is now over.
Norwegian electricity price activist criticises high energy prices and electricity exports to Europe and announces resistance
Norway no longer seems to be willing to pay for the problems of other countries, as the price of electricity is apparently the reason for this. Especially in southern Norway, the increase in wholesale prices is above average, as the region is directly linked to the Central European market. The well-known Norwegian electricity price activist Olav Sylte criticises the fact that Norway exports electricity to Europe via these cables and thus also imports the high prices.
Norway as Europe’s leading oil and gas producer: Resistance to energy supplies to Germany grows Image: Krib, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Sylte has made a name for himself by representing the victims of the large Ponzi schemes in Norway between 2002 and 2005. Now he is not only campaigning for lower energy prices, but is also fighting against the power cables that connect Norway to Germany and the UK. He has a large network, including the Facebook group “We demand cheaper electricity”, which has around 612,000 members.
Although gas continues to be exported to Norway, there is a limit to electricity that the activist and lawyer draws: “Our electricity should be used mainly for our country. […] It’s our Norwegian water, our Norwegian wind,” says Sylte.
Equinor and RWE enter into partnership for the construction of hydrogen power plants
At the beginning of the year, an energy partnership was announced, which provided for the construction of gas-fired power plants that would run on hydrogen. During his visit to Norway in January, Economics Minister Robert Habeck said that the hydrogen should come from Norway. As a result, the Norwegian energy supplier Equinor and the Essen-based energy group RWE entered into a strategic partnership, which was accompanied by Habeck and the Norwegian Minister of State at the signing. Part of the memorandum of understanding was the construction of a hydrogen pipeline between the countries by 2030.
Despite criticism and increasing resistance from the population, Norwegian Oil and Energy Minister Terje Aasland defended the decision. He emphasized that Norway is dependent on foreign electricity and that going it alone would not make sense. It is important that Europe sticks together. Aasland said: “If we were to cut the cables to Central Europe, we would have to build even more power plants here to ensure our supply at all times.”
Norway’s renewable energies in focus: hydropower as the frontrunner
Norway currently produces almost exclusively renewable electricity, with hydropower taking the top spot at 88 percent, playing a central role among renewable energies, as reported by AHK Norway.
Despite the high production of green electricity and exports of electricity and hydrogen, Norway had not been spared from the energy crisis. The price of electricity rose sharply on the stock exchange and amounted to around 2022 euros/mWh in July 250 compared to just under 50 euros/mWh in July 2021. Nevertheless, the Norwegian electricity price remains on average lower than the German price, which was 2022 euros/mWh in July 450. Norway therefore remains an important player in renewable energy production and has a lot of potential to make its contribution to global climate protection in the future.
Norway’s demand for electricity is increasing – nationalisation of the gas pipeline network as a plan B?
Statnett, the state-owned grid operator, predicts a significant increase in Norway’s electricity demand, although the price of electricity seems to be recovering this year. According to a market analysis, electricity demand will increase from the current level of around 140 terawatt hours (TWh) over the next five years to 164 terawatt hours (TWh) by 2027, without a corresponding increase in electricity generation. This will lead to a negative net energy balance in 2027.
That is why Norway has already considered a Plan B. With existing concessions expiring in 2028, Norway plans to nationalize most of its gas pipeline network, according to Aasland’s oil and energy ministry. The goal is to strengthen control over the key infrastructure. However, there is still no exact information about the reasons for this plan.
I reported on the Ulysses Storm, but it was far from being the only extreme weather event that year.
After a wet spring, June turned out to be particularly wet, especially in the south and east of England. In its usual understated fashion, the Met Office at the time noted the month’s “remarkable character”:
The late Philip Eden, the leading weather historian of his time, summed it up well twenty years ago:
Not all Junes in southern England have been as warm, dry and sunny as this month. Exactly 100 years ago there was a prolonged downpour and flood without precedent in London’s meteorological history. In over 300 years of rainfall recording in the capital June 1903 ranks as the wettest individual month, yet there was no rain at all during the first week, nor during the last ten days. In other parts of the UK it was a very dry month with less than 25mm of rain in parts of the north Midlands, Lincolnshire, western and northern Scotland, and Northern Ireland.
The wetness of a wet June, at least in lowland Britain, usually derives from torrential short-lived dowpours, often localised and thundery, and frequently accompanied by great heat. In 1903, by contrast, June’s wetness was a consequence of long-continued steady rain lasting for many hours at a time, unaccompanied by thunder, and associated with unseasonably low temperature. It was the sort of rain more appropriate to autumn than to midsummer.
At Kew Observatory 183mm of rain fell during the middle fortnight of the month – over three times the normal amount for June, and nearly 30mm more than the next wettest. Even more rain fell in north and central Surrey, including 197mm at Waddon New Road in Croydon, 204mm at Addington, 206mm at Brimstone Barn, near Croydon, and 226mm at Carshalton. It is estimated that the rainfall averaged over what now constitutes Greater London was approximately 161mm, which converts to 288 million tons or 64 billion gallons of water, and that is more than 10,000 gallons per person.
Throughout the period a complex depression lay over France, southern Britain and the Low Countries, while high pressure was centred between Scotland and Iceland. The resulting north-easterly airflow fed very moist but very cool air from the southern North Sea across southeast England, so daytime temperatures rose little above 10C on the wettest days. During the middle of the wet period, from lunchtime on the 13th until late evening on the 15th, it rained continuously in central London for a period of almost 59 hours. This is the longest period of unbroken rain ever recorded in a populated part of the United Kingdom.
The Met Office noted that July was “scarcely less remarkable”:
It remained wet in August, and the Met Office noted that rainfall in London for the first eight months of the year was already higher than the annual average:
Still the rain fell, and adding to the misery was a gale of unusual severity on 10th September:
But the worst weather was saved for October. Again the Met Office monthly report did not convey the full impact:
The simple reality was that October 1903 was by a long way the wettest of any months in England:
Rainfall totalled 191.3mm, in comparison to the 170.8mm in November 2009, the wettest month this century.
I have no doubt that the Met Office will attempt to paint the weather this year as “Extreme”, even though we have experienced nothing out of the ordinary so far this year. After all, they do the same thing every year. They’ll mention one of their storms with a silly name, point to some mild weather and a couple of hot days.
But if anybody wants to know what extreme weather really looks like, they only have to look back to the weather 120 years ago.
![The Conversation: “A Single [Climate] Radical Gets More Media Coverage Than Thousands of Marchers”](https://i0.wp.com/climatescience.press/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/0Fue_NpEXwAMkY3r.jpeg?fit=450%2C450&ssl=1)
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