Day: December 20, 2023

El Bosque—a village overtaken by rising sea levels?

But they can’t blame climate change for their sorrows.  They have built upon the sand and the winds and waves have come. 

Playa El Bosque

From Watts Up With That?

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 19 December 2023 – 1100 words/8 minutes

Here’s a story recently being pushed like mad by the climate crisis propagandists: El Bosque!

The last residents of a coastal Mexican town destroyed by climate change

‘It’s time for us to go’: the Mexican fishing village swallowed by the sea

Coastal Mexican town sees rising seas, storms and disappearing locals

The last residents of a coastal Mexican town destroyed by climate change —  Flooding has destroyed the Mexican town of El Bosque

We may be the first people displaced by climate change in Mexico, but we won’t be the last

And back in 2022, published in time for COP27:

Mexican village blames climate change as sea swallows its homes

Who, or what, is El Bosque?   In Spanish, the name means “the forest”, but El Bosque is a forest no more.  This century, it has always been a sandy little peninsula barely above sea level, poking out north from the Mexican coast between Veracruz and the Yucatan peninsula:

Just to the west is the port serving the Puerto Ceiba oil and natural gas operations. 

The first step in looking at this problem is to view the geography – as sea level is basically a geography problem – the relationship between the dry land and the sea.  The satellite imagery above shows clearly some important points:  El Bosque sits on a tiny hooked peninsula that extends out onto a very shallow shelf of sand, at the mouth of the Grijalva River.   The northeast side of the peninsula faces the Gulf of Mexico, while the southwestern shore is inside its own hook and protected from the waves:

The incoming swells are clearly visible even from space.  Now imagine those northeast swells when Hurricane Isidore hit El Bosque (circled)  in Sept 2022:

How many hurricanes affect El Bosque?

A lot of tropical cyclones, all spinning in the same direction, nearly all north of El Bosque, with winds pushing water and waves down on El Bosque from the northeast.  To save you the trouble of counting, that is 37 tropical cyclones in 23 years.   That’s a few more than the 23 in the twenty years before that – and, since the advent of the satellite era, there have been 106 tropical storms affecting the area of interest.   And that’s a lot of wind and waves, peaking up over that shallow sandy bottom and smacking that little peninsula.

Oh – wait!  What about Sea Level Rise?

Ah, the Big Lie.  Nearly every news story blames sea level rise, at least in part,  for El Bosque’s demise. So, let’s have a look.  Disappointingly, there is no good long-term tide gauge in all of Mexico registered with the PSMSL – Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level.   In fact, there does not seem to be any good long-term tide gauge data anywhere in Mexico…many stations have decades of missing data.  One nearby station (on the Yucatan Peninsula), Progresso,  has data from 1952 to 1984, then a separate record up to 1998-2012.   It is plainly marked: “Use only with extreme caution.”  If its data is approximately correct, and there is no guarantee that it is even that, then from about 1960 to 2012 there was 100 mm or 4 inches of Sea Level Rise over those 50 years.  At that rate, for another ten years, we could guess (and it is only a guess, it is not measured data) that Progresso has seen 120 mm or 4.7 inches of SLR (including whatever VLM is seen at Progresso) since about 1960, which would be close to the expected century-long value for global SLR of 8-10 inches.   

This, I admit, is lousy data.  But, it is what we have.  What we don’t have is any data showing that SLR at El Bosque, or anywhere in the southern Gulf of Mexico,  has been in any way exceptional.  And, while five inches of SLR is not nothing, it is not enough to flood and drown little El Bosque.  Sea level rise is not the villain in this little story…nor is climate change. 

What is to blame is this:

The sand shelf off of El Bosque is only 9-14 meters (30-45 feet) deep.  Most of that is shallow enough for me to free-dive.  Storm-driven waves will build and peak and break as they are driven from the northeast by cyclonic storms onto the shore at El Bosque.  Here is the result of decades of storms:

Again, we see the wave pattern clearly in the February  2023 image in the lower right.  Those waves rake the down beach from the point – you can actually see the massive breakers from space.

The truth is that El Bosque will eventually be entirely washed away – it is simply a long-standing, but in no way permanent, little spit of sand, exposed to the wrath of every passing tropical storm that comes hurtling in over the Yucatan.  Like many of the barrier islands along the East Coast of the United States, the El Bosque peninsula is in constant danger of being cut in two at the narrow neck by the next big storm. 

This is not the result of any change in the climate.  It is the result of the climate of the Yucatan Peninsula, which is and (probably) has always been shaped by the tropical storms rolling in from the Caribbean and even some originating in the Atlantic. 

The solution to all of these local problems, whether blamed on climate change or some other imagined ill, is adaptation.  If your land is being eroded away by wind and waves then you must do something other than hope your national government or some international entity will come to your rescue.  For those poor fishermen at El Bosque, they will have to move.  And I hope that their government will give them some financial help in doing so.

But they can’t blame climate change for their sorrows.  They have built upon the sand and the winds and waves have come. 

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

Late Note: 1600 hr 19 December — Although a search of WUWT failed to note it by name — Anthony Watts covered this issue previously HERE. – kh

Narrative journalism gives a lot of legs to propaganda stories like this.  This one has been repeated for the last two COPs.  It even includes photos of posters produced by poor kids that have lost their elementary school, probably requested by the news photographer.   It is a good human-interest story, nonetheless, but the Big Lie is that their troubles have been caused by climate change and sea level rise.

Beach erosion is a natural process and sand spits and sand-based barrier islands are extremely susceptible to erosion.  The time for them to act was a decade ago – build sea walls or move.

Thanks for reading.

Biden admin wants to give climate resilient wolverines ESA protections

In Episode 399 of District of Conservation, Gabriella discusses her recent ALEC Summit speech on natural asset companies, fishing in Arizona’s Salt River, previews CSF NASC podcast interviews, and discusses the USFWS’s proposed rule to list the Lower-48 wolverine on the Endangered Species Act with threatened protections on climate change, not population, grounds. Tune in to learn more.

By Gabriella Hoffman

“Basing this determination on climate modeling and projections that have been consistently inaccurate over decades does not meet the standard of “likely” or even probable at this stage. The North American population of wolverines shares genetic roots with the first wolverines that crossed the Bering Strait— wolverines have demonstrated remarkable resilience, surviving and adapting to various climate fluctuations, including the ice age and other periods of extreme climate change. This longstanding presence in North America underscores the wolverine’s ability to endure and adapt. It is wrong to base an ESA determination on unreliable climate predictions for any species, but especially for one that has proven to be so climate resilient.” — Letter from Senator Steve Daines & Rep. Zinke and Rosendale

In Episode 399 of District of Conservation, Gabriella discusses her recent ALEC Summit speech on natural asset companies, fishing in Arizona’s Salt River, previews CSF NASC podcast interviews, and discusses the USFWS’s proposed rule to list the Lower-48 wolverine on the Endangered Species Act with threatened protections on climate change, not population, grounds. Tune in to learn more.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

EP 579: BAAJA Blast: Permitting Reform or Bust – District of Conservation

In Episode 579 of District of Conservation, Gabriella discusses the permitting reform bill – aka BAAJA – that is gaining traction in Congress now. The Senate will hold a cloture vote starting at 3:30pm ET in a motion to proceed. Gabriella discusses the status quo without permitting reform, how BAAJA is good for the environment and affordability. Tune in!SHOW NOTESBipartisan Policy Center: BAAJA ExplainerEstimating the US Energy System Impacts of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act
  1. EP 579: BAAJA Blast: Permitting Reform or Bust
  2. EP 578: Midterms, CO Amendment 83, Disneyland Goes Electric
  3. EP 577: Kaylyn Glenn – Florida Gladeswoman & Conservationist
  4. EP 576: Chiricahua National Park & Energy Security Index
  5. EP 575: Menhaden Madness (ft. Whit Fosburgh, Forage Fish Campaign)

SHOW NOTES

⁠USFWS Press Release: North American wolverine receives federal protection as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act⁠

⁠Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants; Threatened Species Status With Section 4(d) Rule for North American Wolverine – Due January 29th, 2024⁠

⁠Science: With limited funds for conservation, researchers spar over which species to save—and which to let go⁠

⁠ The Endangered Species Act at 50

The post Biden admin wants to give climate resilient wolverines ESA protections appeared first on CFACT.

Wind Curtailment Costs To Rise To £3 Billion By 2030

It appears that the BBC will print any nonsense it is handed by the renewable/climate lobby

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

It appears that the BBC will print any nonsense it is handed by the renewable/climate lobby:

Wasted wind power will add £40 to the average UK household’s electricity bill in 2023, according to a think tank.

That figure could increase to £150 in 2026, Carbon Tracker has estimated.

When it is very windy, the grid cannot handle the extra power generated. Wind farms are paid to switch off and gas-powered stations are paid to fire up. The cost is passed on to consumers.

The government said major reforms will halve the time it takes to build energy networks to cope with extra wind power.

Most of the UK’s offshore wind farms are in England – Dogger Bank off the coast of Yorkshire is the largest in the world. Meanwhile, around half of onshore wind farms are in Scotland but most electricity is used in south-east England.

Carbon Tracker said the main problem in getting electricity to where it is needed is a bottleneck in transmission between Scotland and England.

The practice of switching off wind farms and ramping up power stations is known as “wind curtailment” and the costs are passed on to consumers, it said.

Carbon Tracker researches the impact of climate change on financial markets. It said since the start of 2023, wind curtailment payments cost £590m, adding £40 to the average consumer bill.

It warned those costs were set to increase to add £180 per year to bills by 2030, due to wind farms being built faster than the power cabling needed to transmit the electricity.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67494082

For a start, they can’t even get their numbers right.

They say that wind constraint payments cost £590 million this year. Households however only use a third of electricity generated, so they are only directly paying about £196 million towards the bill. This equates to £7 per home, not £40.

They have also got their logic upside down. It is not “wasted wind power”, but the constraint payments that households are paying for. The answer is simple – refuse to pay them.

The problem, of course, is not “lack of infrastructure”, as they claim. It is that we ever built so many wind farms in Scotland, so far away from consumers, who will have to pay for all of this infrastructure as well. Yet we still have not learnt our lesson and are carrying on building even more. According to Carbon Tracker, constraint payments could rocket to over £3 billion by 2030.

Gone with the wind?

It’s like subsidising new factories in the middle of nowhere in the Scottish Highlands, but not building any road links.

As the BBC is suddenly concerned about energy bills, maybe it should remind its readers that they are already paying some £1.2 billion to subsidise Scotland’s onshore wind farms every year.

The Daintree, it’s been a Tribulation with Jasper – Support a Local with a Book Purchase

It is a privately-owned World Heritage property that receives no financial assistance from government and is dependent on its own cost-recovery capabilities. I’m referring to Daintree Rainforest, formerly Cooper’s Creek Wilderness.

From Jennifer Marohasy

December 20, 2023 By jennifer

It is a privately-owned World Heritage property that receives no financial assistance from government and is dependent on its own cost-recovery capabilities. I’m referring to Daintree Rainforest, formerly Cooper’s Creek Wilderness.

Owned and operated by my dear friend Neil Hewett, it was deluged with all the rain in the aftermath of cyclone Jasper.

Neil has lived in this oldest surviving rainforest through all of this before, again and again. His children grew-up under the canopy, with all the wildlife the cacophony of different sounds, smells, and beings.

Neil and his three children, photograph taken more than a decade ago. His children, like my daughter, are all grown up now.

It is the case that people from cities sometimes lament the lack of ‘art and culture’ in places like north Queensland, but this is only because they can’t see both the art and culture that is intrinsic to this landscape.

The beauty etched onto even the bark of trees by even a lichen spider.

To be able to show you the spiders, cassowaries and the geckos, the range road needs to be re-opened, after the ferry is re-opened, but the Captain Cook Highway may not re-open until late January.

In the meantime, I hope you might support Neil’s writing by purchasing the most wonderful book, A Stray Liana.

It is Neil’s story, that attempts to reconcile different perspectives and showcase nature.

As Neil wrote when I hosted a series at this weblog on the nature of wilderness some years ago,

For me, wilderness both resonates of human potential and also describes the ultimate expression of humanity. No other state of relations can be more admirable. Far from the notion of humankind and wilderness being mutually exclusive, I believe we must rather aspire to change for the benefit of wilderness and in so doing, restore to ourselves, integrity.

Neil has, and lives, a different perspective. Buy his book, replete with photographs of Australian nature and words of wisdom from under a rainforest canopy arguably the oldest surviving old-growth rainforest on Earth.

An orchid from the Daintree.
The main street of Mossman just a few days ago after cyclone Jasper, a town north of Cairns, you pass through it on the way to Daintree Rainforest.
The road to Cape Tribulation is likely to be impassable for some time because of the landslides. This landslide down Thornton Peak was filmed by Neil just two days ago.
One of my favourite photographs in his book, A Stray Liana.

I hope you might support Neil’s writing by purchasing this most wonderful book, A Stray Liana https://www.astrayliana.com.au/product/a-stray-liana-book/

Audi hits brakes on EV rollout as enthusiasm wanes

Audi, whose electric models include the £69,480 Q8 e-tron, faces cheaper competition from China, which is also a key market for Volkswagen’s brands.

By Howard Mustoe

Audi will hit the brakes on its rollout of electric car models as consumer enthusiasm wanes in the face of high prices compared to petrol models.

Gernot Döllner, the boss of the Volkswagen-owned brand, said that he wants to avoid flooding dealerships and factories with the vehicles as sales slow. The Telegraph has the story.

“The advantage of EVs (electric vehicles) is becoming visible to consumers step by step,” Mr Döllner told Bloomberg News.

Official forecasts for electric car take-up in the UK were slashed by almost half last month. Sales of new battery-powered cars were expected to grow steadily until they accounted for 67pc of the market by 2027, under a prediction issued in March.

But that figure has now been revised down to just 38pc by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which said the take-up of EVs has been slowing.

Mr Döllner, who was an executive at upmarket stablemate Porsche, was hired in the summer to reinvigorate the mid-market brand, on which Volkswagen relies for a large chunk of its profits.

Audi, whose electric models include the £69,480 Q8 e-tron, faces cheaper competition from China, which is also a key market for Volkswagen’s brands.

While electric cars are cheaper to run, their initial price remains stubbornly higher than petrol and diesel models.

It comes as electric car sales fell by the most on record last month following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s climbdown on banning petrol models.

Sales of EVs plummeted by 17pc from November last year, according to the statistics published by industry group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders.

The drop beat a 9.7pc fall in April 2020, when showrooms closed due to lockdown restrictions and a 7.9pc decline in the early days of EV sales in March 2008.

The Government pushed back a petrol car sales ban from 2030 to 2035 in a move which carmakers warned could knock consumer confidence in EVs.

Much of the 17pc EV sales drop from last year was due to a glut of deliveries in 2022 following months of supply problems.

But the percentage of electric cars being sold has fallen compared to the rest of the year, according to the figures, with EVs taking only 15.6pc of car sales in November compared to 16.3pc in the first 10 months of the year.

Volkswagen is likely to cut jobs in order to protect its profitability, it emerged last month.

On Monday, managers told VW brand employees of the plans for job reductions.

VW may cut jobs through early retirements, since it has a relatively large number of older workers due to retire.

Factory output for Germany, Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse, fell to a three-year low in September, dragged down by weak car production.

Output fell 1.5pc compared to August, the lowest production since 2020, with carmakers and their suppliers’ production figures dropping 5pc.

In October, Porsche said soaring borrowing costs and rising prices were starting to bite even its wealthy clientele.

Read the full story here.

REAL AMERICA — Stella Escobedo W/ Craig Rucker, Analysis Of The COP28 Climate Summit

COP 28 was “a smorgasbord of far Left groups and people who are in the renewable energy industry who have a vested financial interest. Also people with an ideological interest in advancing the climate agenda.”

CFACT has been to 25 of the 28 UN COP conferences. 

COP 28 was “a smorgasbord of far Left groups and people who are in the renewable energy industry who have a vested financial interest. Also people with an ideological interest in advancing the climate agenda.”

The post REAL AMERICA — Stella Escobedo W/ Craig Rucker, Analysis Of The COP28 Climate Summit appeared first on CFACT.

Reason is Right, There is No ‘Climate Cliff’

The threshold value was first developed by a panel of advisors who had no data to show that 1.5° warming would be catastrophic, and the language used by the media has only become more extreme since then.


By Linnea Lueken

Reason magazine recently posted an article on its website titled “There Is No 1.5°C Climate Cliff,” arguing that the 1.5°C threshold touted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, world governments, and activists, is not based on any scientific investigation, but is rather arbitrary. This is true. The threshold value was first developed by a panel of advisors who had no data to show that 1.5° warming would be catastrophic, and the language used by the media has only become more extreme since then.

In the post, writer Ronald Bailey explains that the 1.5°C threshold was developed in the 1990s by the German Advisory Council on Global Change.

Bailey writes:

The advisors adopted two principles to guide their work. The first was the “preservation of Creation in its present form” achieved chiefly by staying within their guess of what would be “a tolerable ‘temperature window.’’’ The second was the “prevention of excessive costs.” Their analysis of what would constitute a tolerable temperature window occupies a single paragraph. There they reckoned that the mean maximum temperature during the last interglacial period was 16.1 C to which they arbitrarily added a further 0.5 C to establish tolerable maximum temperature of 16.6 C. They then assumed that in 1995 the current global mean temperature was around 15.3 C which would be only 1.3 C below their tolerable maximum. Finally, they presupposed the 1995 average was 0.7 C above the preindustrial average which yields an overall 2.0 C threshold.

This was clearly not a rigorous scientific investigation. Climate Realism has explained this fact in past posts as well, such as, here, here, and here, where we point out that there is also no evidence to suggest passing that arbitrary warming threshold would cause “climate chaos” or positive-feedback type cascading events. Climate at a Glance: Tipping Points concurs, showing that there is no evidence that irreversible tipping points exist at all. Since the conception of the threshold, only computer models with faulty assumptions built in have driven the alarmist claims and associated headlines tied to the 1.5C figure.

It is also possible that the 1.5°C threshold has already been passed. Meteorologist Anthony Watts explains in “Media Regurgitates IPCC’s ‘Final Warning’ on Climate Change – Without Realizing We’ve Already Passed 1.5°C,” Berkeley Earth global surface temperature data show that the planet may have warmed a full 4°C since 1750. Despite this, no catastrophes have occurred, and extreme weather has not become worse since that period.

Bailey writes “it is good, although not surprising, news that when the world passes through the 1.5 C target, it will not be plunging to its death over a climate cliff.” He is absolutely correct, and what’s more, some climate scientists and media have been cautioning against making claims that make 1.5°C sound like an existential threat. The fact is, if it has not been passed already as discussed above, the threshold is going to be passed soon, even if immense fossil fuel cuts are made. When disasters don’t materialize, climate scientists who previously hyped the 1.5 C threshold as an catastrophic tipping points will, or at least should, lose credibility.

Reason and Ronald Bailey should be applauded for publishing such a detailed and thorough investigation of the origin and lack of scientific basis for the popular global warming threshold. There is no evidence that supports the idea that 1.5°C warming will be a dangerous “climate cliff” that will cause more chaotic weather.

The post Reason is Right, There is No ‘Climate Cliff’ appeared first on ClimateRealism.

The Sahara Desert used to be a green savannah – new research explains why

Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.

The-‘Eye-of-Sahara-by-ESA-3

 From The Conversation

By Edward Armstrong

Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.

Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.

These images depict a period approximately 6,000-11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.

This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.

These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.

As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.

We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.

Africa’s vegetation cycles. Author provided (no reuse)

This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.

Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.

Earth’s changing orbit

The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.

On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.

The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.

Eccentricity and the ice sheets

In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.

The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.

The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.

The Sahara desert. Getty Images

Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.

Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.

An Outbreak of Polar Stratospheric Clouds

“It’s that magical time of year again,” says Chad Blakley, owner of the aurora tour guide service Lights over Lapland in Abisko, Sweden. “We just witnessed a spectacular display of polar stratospheric clouds.”

From Spaceweather.com

By DR.TONY PHILLIPS

Dec. 17, 2023: (Spaceweather.com) A cold wave just swept through the Arctic stratosphere. Really cold. We know because on Dec. 17th these colorful clouds appeared over Sweden:

Above: A “PSC selfie” by Lights over Lapland driver Dimitrios Roukounakis

“It’s that magical time of year again,” says Chad Blakley, owner of the aurora tour guide service Lights over Lapland in Abisko, Sweden. “We just witnessed a spectacular display of polar stratospheric clouds.”

Widely considered to be the most beautiful clouds on Earth, polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) are rare. Earth’s stratosphere is very dry and normally it has no clouds at all. PSCs form when the temperature in the Arctic stratosphere drops to a staggeringly-low -85 C. Then, and only then, can widely-spaced water molecules begin to coalesce into tiny ice crystals. High-altitude sunlight shining through the crystals creates intense iridescent colors that can rival auroras.

NASA forecast models of the polar stratosphere show that temperatures have indeed dropped into the very low range required for colorful Type II PSCs:

Above: Note the temperature dip inside the highlighted yellow oval

During a typical Arctic winter, PSCs appear no more than a handful of times, and the first sightings usually come in January. The apparition on Dec. 17th marks an early start, and may herald many more PSCs to come. Stay tuned!

more images: from Pekka Lähteenmäki of Helsinki, Finland; from Alan C. Tough of Elgin, Moray, Scotland

Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud — Lazard Edition

Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?

From The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN

Francis Menton

My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott. In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?

Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

Among the big players in this game, one that stands out is the investment bank Lazard. As an investment bank, Lazard makes its money — in its case quite big money — by causing deals to happen between investors and project developers. Investment banks often promote themselves by issuing reports on conditions for investment in various economic sectors. In Lazard’s case, back around 2008, they decided to become the gurus of green energy investing by issuing annual reports on what they call the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE. They have continued to issue the LCOE reports annually since then, so I’m gathering that this must be quite a lucrative business. Here is a link for the most recent Lazard LCOE Report, which came out earlier this year in April 2023.

The Lazard LCOE Reports are famous for their repeated conclusion that wind turbines and solar panels have become the cheapest sources for generation of electricity. When you read someone in climate advocacy journalism reciting that talking point, most often the source of the point is one of these Lazard reports. In a post back in March 2019, title “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?,” I put together a sample list of half a dozen outlets citing Lazard LCOE studies for the proposition that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity. Those sources included, for example, the Financial Times, CBS News, Australia’s governmental research arm CSIRO, Axios, Think Progress, and others.

For the first decade or so of its LCOE reports, Lazard calculated the cost of energy from wind and solar without including any cost at all for the backup or storage needed to turn those sources into a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electrical grid. But somewhere in there Lazard starting adding to its reports some additional pages on what they call the Levelized Cost of Storage, or LCOS. Remarkably, after adding in the cost of storage, Lazard still seems to be coming to the conclusion that wind and solar generation are usually cheaper than generation from fossil fuels, or at the very least they are competitive. Could this possibly be right?

The Lazard 2023 LCOE Report is presented almost entirely in the form of charts and graphs. There is very little text, and you will struggle to try to figure out what assumptions underlie the conclusions. (From the website Watt-Logic, commenting on the 2023 Lazard LCOE report, and particularly on Lazard’s calculation of the cost of “firming” intermittent renewable generation with storage: “It’s actually quite hard to work out what’s going on here.”; from Andy May at Watts Up With That, December 11, “[T]hey bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.”)

With that introduction, here is the key chart from the 2023 Lazard LCOE Report giving figures for cost of wind and solar power with “firming,” supposedly compared to the cost of generating electricity from natural gas “CT” or natural gas “combined cycle.”

By all means take your time to try to digest all of that. If you go to the Lazard Report for assistance, you will not find any useful text beyond what is there in the footnotes at the bottom of the chart. I read the chart as putting the “levelized cost” of “firming” intermittent wind and solar generation at as little as $23/MWh in the Midwest, up to a maximum of $98/MWh in California. Add this cost of “firming” to the “unsubsidized” cost of wind and solar generation, and you get a total for “firmed” power from wind and solar that is mostly within the range (and often toward the lower end) of costs for generation from combined cycle natural gas plants, and at most toward the low end of the range of costs for generation from natural gas “peaker” plants. In other words, while wind and solar are not proven to always be “the cheapest” after including the costs of “firming,” they are generally toward the cheaper end of the range of costs from natural gas generation, and certainly not out of the range of affordability.

But wait a minute. Where did they get these costs of “firming”? These costs appear ridiculously low compared to amounts that I find in my December 2022 energy storage Report. Study those fine print footnotes all you want, and I do not think you are going to find the answer. Can we find anything anywhere else in this Lazard document to help us understand the difference?

After spending some time trying to figure this out, the best I come up with is this chart from page 17 of the Lazard LCOE Report:

This appears to be the set of assumptions they apply for how energy storage will be used to “firm” the intermittent wind and solar generation. Let’s pluck a few key numbers out of this chart:

  • In the column headed “Storage Duration (Hours),” we find a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4. Four hours of duration just happens to be the norm for the capability of today’s most cost-effective battery storage technology, lithium ion batteries. Unfortunately, the studies that I feature in my energy storage Report calculate that the number of hours duration of storage needed to fully “firm” a system using only wind and solar generation would be at least one month (720 hours), and potentially two to three months (1440 to 2160 hours). Lazard would seem to be off by a factor of somewhere between 180 and 540 of what would be needed.
  • Then there is a column headed “90% DOD Cycles/Day.” In each case the entry is “1.” I interpret this to mean that whatever battery we are dealing with here is assumed to have one full charge/discharge cycle per day. The next column tells us they are assuming 350 days per year, so therefore they are assuming that the batteries cycle 350 times per year. So the batteries can spread their costs over 350 cycles per year, or 7000 cycles in 20 years. Unfortunately, as shown in my energy storage Report, due to seasonal patterns of the wind and sun, much of the battery storage capacity needed to “firm” a wind/solar generation system will only go through one full charge and discharge cycle per year. Thus, for this part of the storage capacity, Lazard would appear to be understating the cost of the storage by a factor of 350.

Am I maybe interpreting this chart incorrectly? Perhaps. The Lazard people certainly don’t make it easy to figure out their assumptions. But the two issues that I have identified would be about right in their effects to explain the differences between the costs produced by Lazard, and the costs that I estimated, where the difference is about one to two orders of magnitude (that is, a factor of between 10 and 100).

Now, consider the question of whether cost figures in the Lazard Report are the result of rank incompetence versus intentional deception. Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation?

Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?