Day: February 22, 2024

The Hockey Stick Trial: Science Dies in a DC Courtroom

“Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected.”

From The RealClearEnergy

By Rupert Darwall

“Science,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper, “is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which errors are systematically criticised and fairly often, in time, corrected.” The sub-title of Popper’s 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations, in which he argued that science progresses through inspired conjectures checked by attempts to refute them through criticism, is “The Growth of Scientific Knowledge.” Now, a six-person jury in Washington, DC has refuted Popper’s formulation of the uniqueness of science, finding in favor of climate scientist Michael Mann in the defamation suit he brought against Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn dating back to 2012.

Central to Mann’s case was his attempt to reconstruct global temperature over the previous millennium – the iconic “hockey stick” graph. The graph shows global temperatures purportedly falling for centuries and suddenly shooting upwards with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Mann’s hockey stick representation was derived principally from selected tree ring data based on the assumption that tree rings constitute accurate proxies for temperature and are not contaminated by confounding factors such as rainfall, seasonal variability, and levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The results that Mann produced are also sensitive to decisions on and application of statistical techniques.

There can be little doubt of the hockey stick’s historic importance in the development and propagation of what became the dominant scientific paradigm of climate change. In 2001, the hockey stick was given star billing in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, where it appeared twice in the synthesis report, twice more in a diagram combining past and future temperature change, and again on the third page of the Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers. Gerald North, a leading atmospheric physicist at Texas A&M University and one of the most cited authors in the geosciences, had no doubt as to the significance of the hockey stick. “The planet has been cooling slowly until one hundred and twenty years ago, when, bam! It jumps up,” North told Science in 2000. “We’ve been breaking our backs on [greenhouse] detection, but I found the one-thousand-year records more convincing than any of our detection studies.” For Mann, the hockey stick was his ticket to climate super-stardom.

In keeping with Popper’s premise about science, however, Mann’s hockey stick aroused criticism from its first appearance. In response, Mann engaged in distinctly anti-Popperian efforts to suppress all criticism of the hockey stick and discussion of rival temperature reconstructions that might raise awkward questions about its scientific validity. A rival reconstruction by fellow paleo-climatologist Keith Briffa, for example, derived from tree ring data obtained from northern Canada and Siberia, showed a noticeable decline in temperatures over the latter part of the 20th century – opening up a divergence with the instrumental record. If tree rings suggested declining temperatures when temperatures were actually rising, then how could climate scientists put any confidence in tree rings as thermometers? Up could really mean down.

Briffa then wrote a paper for Science comparing the rival reconstructions. As we know from the Climategate emails leaked in 2009, Mann contacted the editor of Science. “Better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us,” he wrote, copying in one of his co-authors, Raymond Bradley. After Science published Briffa’s paper, Mann tried to patch things up. “Thanks for all the hard work,” he emailed colleagues. The sentiment didn’t go down well with Bradley. “Excuse me while I puke,” Bradley emailed Briffa.

Such shenanigans are small beer compared to the surgery undertaken on the graphs of proxy reconstructions showcased in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. To deal with Briffa’s question-inducing temperature decline, Mann, as lead chapter author, and a tight-knit team resorted to the simple expedient of truncating adverse data that could serve as a “potential distraction/detraction,” Mann explained to his colleagues, and thereby hiding the temperature decline shown by Briffa’s proxies when temperatures were rising. The gambit also involved using actual temperature data to smooth the proxy curves in what became known as “Mike’s Nature trick,” something Mann had done previously in a paper submitted to that journal.

There was a more fundamental problem with the construction of the hockey stick. Analysis conducted by Canadians Steve McIntyre, a former mining engineer with a strong grounding in mathematics, and environmental economist Ross McKitrick using an algorithm based on a fragment of Mann’s computer code, found that running statistically trendless “red noise” produced hockey stick shapes 99 percent of the time. In other words, you could get hockey sticks from random junk data if you had enough of it.

Mann included in his proxy data set a series of bristlecone and foxtail pines from the western United States that had been selected by researcher Donald Graybill to study the possible effects of carbon dioxide fertilization on tree growth. To get the hockey stick from the data, Mann needed both the algorithm and Graybill’s tree ring data. Did Mann know what he was doing? Inside his directory of North American proxy data, Mann had a folder which he had labelled BACKTO_1400-CENSORED containing the North American data except all sixteen of the Graybill series. When the numbers from the CENSORED folder were run, the blade of the hockey stick disappeared.

While the blade of the hockey stick showed a sharp, anomalous rise in global temperature coinciding with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, its shaft also performed a critical function in radically revising the previously accepted climatological record by showing a steady decline in temperatures from the end of the first millennium. What previous generations of climatologists called the Medieval Warm Period had disappeared.

The Medieval Warm Period presented a twofold problem to the new climate change orthodoxy. It implied a much greater amplitude of natural variability beyond the bounds posited by the new scientific consensus of human-driven climate change, and it challenged the catastrophist narrative of global warming. If the prosperity of the Middle Ages and Viking settlement of Greenland occurred during an extended period of unusual warmth, then modern societies, too, could survive and prosper in a period of rising temperature.

In written congressional testimony in 2011, the climate scientist John Christy recalled discussions on the preparation of the Third Assessment Report when he pressed for inclusion of the findings of a 1998 paper in which Greenland ice-borehole temperatures provide a 20,000-year reconstruction. “Their result indicated a clear 500-year period of temperatures, warmer than the present, centered about 900 AD,” Christy testified. Despite – or, perhaps, because – of the importance of the paper in contradicting the hockey stick, the Third Assessment Report ignored the paper altogether.

Mann went further in a 2008 paper that presented a 2,000-year temperature reconstruction. The reconstruction was derived from sediments from Lake Korttajarvi in Iceland analyzed in a paper by the Finnish geologist Mia Tiljander. But Mann’s reconstruction inverted the Tiljander proxies, so warming became cooling and cooling became warming. According to Matti Saarnisto, one of Tiljander’s co-authors, the Medieval Warm Period was shown in a mirror image. In an email he’d received from Bradley, who despite his previous experience was still one of Mann’s co-authors, a large group of researchers had been handling extensive material and “at some point it happened that this graph was turned upside down.” Was this done on purpose or by mistake? “It has been turned upside down twice in Science, and now I doubt if it can be a mistake any more,” Saarnisto said, adding that the authors belong to a group “skeptical about this Medieval Warm Period and have tried to hide it to some extent.”

***

Mann’s defamation suit revolved around two issues. The first relates to Simberg and Steyn linking the investigation of Mann at Penn State, where he was professor of meteorology, to the university’s investigation and cover-up involving football coach and convicted child rapist Jerry Sandusky. Penn State president Graham Spanier was later convicted of child endangerment for his role in the Sandusky cover-up. As Steyn told the court in his opening statement:

the same scoundrel who protected Sandusky also protected Michael Mann. So, we’re not comparing Mann with Sandusky; we’re comparing the investigation of Mann with the investigation of Sandusky – because both investigations were controlled by the same chap: a corrupt convicted criminal called Graham Spanier.

Of the two defendants, Simberg’s language was the less delicate and more direct. As Steyn told the jury, quoting directly from his original piece, “I’m not sure I would have extended that metaphor all the way into the locker room showers with quite the zeal Mr. Simberg does, but he has a point,” distancing himself from Simberg’s statement that Mann could be regarded as the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.

The second issue relates to Simberg and Steyn describing Mann’s hockey stick as fraudulent. Though this was less inflammatory than the linkage made between Mann and Sandusky via Penn State’s respective investigations into their conduct, the jury believed that it was the greater offense. It imposed just $1,000 in punitive damages on Simberg but $1 million – one thousand times more – on Steyn. (The jury awarded Mann a dollar each from Simberg and Steyn to compensate him for damage to his reputation.) The massive differential in punishments the jury meted out to the two defendants can only be explained by the jury’s political bias. Steyn has a high profile as one of the most accomplished of conservative commentators. Evidently, the DC jury decided to make an example of Steyn and discourage any public questioning of today’s consensus of human-caused climate change.

In his opening statement, Steyn argued that it is not for the courts to adjudicate science. “A scientific theorem that requires validation by a courtroom verdict is not science at all,” Steyn argued. In principle, a court should be able to assess whether evidence used to make a scientific claim has been knowingly distorted, omitted, concealed or, in some other way, manipulated to produce a desired result. After all, fraud is not limited to theft but includes the tort of fraudulent misrepresentation.

Mann’s lawsuit demonstrates that the courts – at least, a court in the nation’s capital with politically biased jurors – are not capable of objective evaluation. Such cases also involve federal rules on the admissibility of evidence proffered by expert witnesses and the Daubert standard for scientific evidence. In a 39-page report, climate scientist Judith Curry gave her opinion that it is “reasonable” to have referred to the hockey stick in 2012 as “fraudulent” in the sense that “aspects of it are deceptive and misleading.”

However, Judge Alfred S. Irving excluded Curry’s report, which catalogued the manipulations of data to get a hockey stick shape and quoted severe criticisms of the hockey stick made even by climate scientists supportive of the climate-change consensus (most of these made privately). For his exclusion, the judge cited grounds that “the methodologies of the expert must be grounded in the scientific method, such that another person with similar expertise could replicate them.” Ruling on the inadmissibility of her testimony, Judge Irving said: “To wit, her expert report does not contain any explanations of her methodologies, making it impossible for the Court to find her testimony reliable.” There is little theoretical difference between cataloguing evidence to determine fraudulent misrepresentation in financial and commercial cases and evidence to assess scientific fraud; it would be absurd to require fraud investigators to set out their methodologies and expect different investigators to compile identical reports.

The trial closed with Mann’s counsel, John Williams, making a naked appeal to the jurors’ political prejudices. Williams urged the jury to award punitive damages so that no one will dare engage in “climate denialism” – just as Donald Trump’s “election denialism” needed to be suppressed. “In 41 years of trying cases to juries,” John Hinderaker wrote on the Powerline blog, “I have never heard such an outrageously improper appeal.”

Steyn related in his opening statement that Mann had chosen not to sue him for describing the hockey stick as fraudulent in any of the English-speaking jurisdictions lacking the free speech protections of the First Amendment. The upshot of Mann’s victory, Steyn warned, would be that “you cannot call his hockey stick a fraud in the United States, but you can in all the countries that chose, unlike you rebellious guys, to remain within the British Empire.”

This points to the biggest issue at stake in the trial. On the northeast wall of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, is carved a short extract that Thomas Jefferson had drafted for a bill on establishing religious freedom. Its preamble provides the philosophical justification for why the First Amendment is ranked first:

truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

As Popper argued, free argument and debate are not only essential for the advance of scientific knowledge. They also constitute the fundamental requirement for the maintenance of a constitutional republic. 

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of  Green Tyranny.

Climate Dieticians Push Americans to Cut Beef for the Sake of the Planet

I have a big problem with the anti-beef push. In a world where just under 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, attacking the supply of food in the name of the alleged climate emergency in my opinion should be viewed as a crime against humanity.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… Replacing beef with a different protein — even for just one meal — can cut the emissions footprint of a person’s diet that day by as much as half. …”

One Simple Change to Reduce Your Climate Impact? Swap Out Beef

Replacing beef with a different protein — even for just one meal — can cut the emissions footprint of a person’s diet that day by as much as half. 

By Zahra Hirji
21 February 2024 at 20:00 GMT+10

Next time you’re out for lunch, try playing a little game: Without looking it up, can you find the most and least climate-friendly options on the menu?

Unlike a meal’s price, the greenhouse-gas footprint of food isn’t typically spelled out. But you don’t need to ask a climate scientist to find out either. There’s one simple trick for identifying the highest impact item on almost any menu: If there’s beef, that’s probably it.

…

“You don’t have to become a vegan to have a big impact on your carbon footprint,” says Diego Rose, a professor and director of the nutrition program at Tulane University. “You just have to swap out beef.”

…

Beef’s footprint is especially outsized. For one, there are roughly 1.5 billion cows on the planet. About 13 million square kilometers (3.2 billion acres) of land is used to raise all that cattle, along with buffalo, and their food — one-quarter of all land used for agriculture, according to a 2017 paper in Global Food Security. Then there’s the methane. Cows and other ruminants have a unique digestive system that allows them to turn grass into fuel, but in the process their special gut bacteria releases methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the short term.

…

“In the US, most of us eat more beef than what’s considered healthy for us,” says Stephanie Roe, a climate and energy lead scientist at the nonprofit World Wildlife Fund. “So that’s low-hanging fruit because then we can improve our health outcomes in addition to environmental ones.”

…Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-21/the-diet-shift-that-makes-the-biggest-impact-on-climate-change?embedded-checkout=true

I have a big problem with the anti-beef push.

There is a reason cowboys herded cows in the old West, and why the African Maasai and many other peoples still do, and why beef cattle are chosen when other crops would in theory produce a much higher yield per acre.

Cattle can be raised in harsh regions which are far too unforgiving for other farm produce.

The suggestion raising beef is taking far more land than other food production, with the implicit suggestion that land dedicated to beef production could be repurposed for other produce, in my opinion verges on a lie by omission. I’m sure some cattle land could be used for other purposes, but a lot of it couldn’t.

In places where beef production is the only option, abandoning beef would mean abandoning food – dramatically reducing the total food available for people to eat.

Even in places where other food choices are available, the anti-beef push could impact food supplies. Stopping beef production would not automatically equate to increased production of other food.

In a world where just under 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, attacking the supply of food in the name of the alleged climate emergency in my opinion should be viewed as a crime against humanity.

West braces for China’s electric car shock

Made by China’s biggest car-maker BYD, the shipment has the potential to turn rising international tensions into an explosive all-out trade war between Beijing and the West.

An EV invasion threatens to run European carmakers off the road.

The port of Vlissingen in the south-west of the Netherlands has been at the heart of world commerce for centuries.

Roughly 17,000 cargo ships dock in its deep waters between the North Sea and the river Scheldt every year, laden with everything from vital commodities such as paper, timber, and steel; coal, liquefied gases, fertiliser and other key raw materials; to well as fruit and vegetables that will quickly find their way onto supermarket shelves.

On Wednesday, the harbour took delivery of one of its most significant consignments yet: 5,000 electric cars straight from a factory in Shenzhen, China, destined for forecourts across Europe and Britain.

The Telegraph has the story.

Made by China’s biggest car-maker BYD, the shipment has the potential to turn rising international tensions into an explosive all-out trade war between Beijing and the West.

Electric cars, along with lithium batteries and solar panels, are what President Xi Jinping has proclaimed are “pillars of the economy”: sectors that the Chinese government has chosen to be the drivers of a massive manufacturing export boom. Commerce minister Wang Wentao has described them as China’s “new three” industries.

The country’s leaders are desperate to offset a property slump triggered by the spectacular collapse of debt-laden developer Evergrande, which has crushed consumer confidence. Attempts by China’s securities watchdog to prop up the nation’s $8.6 trillion (£6.8 trillion) stock market, by banning institutional investors from selling shares at the open and close of trading, shows how concerned officials are about consumer confidence.

“Since China’s reopening after the pandemic, industrial production has been quite strong but it has not got the domestic demand for that,” says Duncan Wrigley of Pantheon Macroeconomics.

“Households are reluctant to spend as much because they’re concerned about the future. People worry that if they lose a job now they won’t be able to get a replacement. That is contributing to the continued weakness in the property sector.”

Xi hopes that a state-backed manufacturing drive led by advanced goods and materials will power a fresh era of growth. But the prospect of China attempting to save its economy by flooding the West with cheap cars has policymakers in Europe and America on red alert.

The fear in Brussels and Washington is that with domestic demand in the doldrums, China will seek to ease over-capacity by dumping its goods – selling them abroad at lower prices than at home – on international markets and trashing Western industry. With officials already threatening serious recriminations, and Beijing warning of counter-reprisals, trade tensions are once again dangerously high.

As BYD’s Explorer No.1 ship was making its way through the English Channel after a five-week voyage to the Zeeland archipelago where Vlissingen juts out, the boss of Renault waded into the row with a plea to Britain and Europe to work together to resist what the industry fears will be an onslaught of super-cheap Chinese electric vehicles.

“With the internal combustion engine, our leadership was undisputed. For a century, we benefited from our expertise with this technology, and it was a barrier to entry for newcomers. Today, Europeans find themselves in a position of relative fragility,” Luca de Meo, chief executive of the French carmaker said.

De Meo and his counterparts are right to be concerned. By the second half of last year, the Chinese had captured about 10pc of the European electric vehicle market, according to Schmidt Automotive Research.

An invasion of Chinese cars promises to be great for Western consumers but terrible for carmakers in Europe. A typical Tesla can cost £40,000, whereas BYD’s models go for as little as £8,000. Chinese carmakers are offering generous discounts of up to €12,000 to boost sales on the Continent, Schmidt’s researchers found.

Even Elon Musk, the industry’s original trailblazer and someone who once laughed at the suggestion that BYD could ever compete with Tesla, is running scared. Without trade barriers, Chinese players “will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world”, Musk said shortly after BYD toppled Tesla as the number one seller of electric models in mainland China at the end of 2023.

A report by Bloomberg’s New Energy Finance predicts that annual sales of electric vehicles will reach 56 million globally by 2040 – equivalent to 58pc of all cars sold around the world. It also believes China’s share of the electric car market will be 40pc by the end of this decade, a forecast supported by the International Energy Agency.

Read the full story here.

Out Of Transmission Revisited

The “energy transition” depends on massive expansions of our high-voltage transmission grid. But capacity additions are falling, and per-mile costs and utility product costs are soaring.

From Watts Up With That?

By Robert Byce’s Substack

Robert Bryce

The “energy transition” depends on massive expansions of our high-voltage transmission grid. But capacity additions are falling, and per-mile costs and utility product costs are soaring.

Proponents of the much-hyped “energy transition” frequently claim that rapid decarbonization of the electricity sector can only be achieved with huge expansions of America’s high-voltage transmission grid. We are told those expansions, totaling tens of thousands of miles of new capacity, must be completed in the next decade or two.

Once this “grid modernization” has been completed, the new grid will deliver juice from vast areas of rural America that have been paved with solar panels and wind turbines to consumers living in distant cities. In doing so, this new grid will deliver us to the Valhalla of “a net-zero economy with high electrification of transport, industry, and buildings by midcentury,” in which, presumably, everyone is using “clean” energy that’s too cheap to meter.  

But there’s a terawatt-size disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality. America isn’t building anything close to the amount of high-voltage transmission capacity that the wind promoters, solar advocates, and spreadsheet jockeys claim is needed. Indeed, the latest numbers from Atlanta-based C Three Group show that the amount of new high-voltage transmission (230kV and above) built annually in the United States is flat or declining. Furthermore, the cost of building new high-voltage capacity and the components needed to expand the electric grid is skyrocketing. Meanwhile, all across rural America,  transmission projects are facing fierce resistance from local communities and some Native American tribes. Let’s take a look.

In 2023, the U.S. added about 1,251 miles of new high-voltage capacity. That’s significantly below the average number of miles added to the U.S. power grid over the past two decades. According to C Three, which has the best information on transmission trends in the U.S., about 1,677 miles of new high-voltage capacity was added annually to the grid between 2008 and 2023.

As seen in the graphic above, new capacity additions peaked in 2013, when Texas completed the CREZ lines, a system of HV lines spanning some 3,600 miles. That $7 billion project is significant because the CREZ lines were all built intrastate. That is, they didn’t cross any state boundaries, which made the permitting process much easier. In addition, Texas has very little federal land and relatively few state parks.

Costs are also soaring. Before diving into those numbers, reviewing the hype is essential. Last February, in the original “Out Of Transmission” published in these pages,  I explained that billionaire investor John Doerr, who has funded a “sustainability” school at Stanford University and is giving hundreds of millions of dollars to climate activist groups, claims we need enormous expansions of the grid to accommodate more wind and solar projects.

In his 2021 book Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, Doerr lays out what he calls “Key Emission Reduction Policies” including a clean electricity standard that could, in theory anyway, cut emissions by at least 50% by 2025 and 100% by 2040. In what amounts to a footnote, Doerr explains that his modeling assumes “a doubling of the transmission system above business as usual.” But Doerr didn’t deign to explain how that doubling will happen.

In that same article, I explained that in 2022, the Biden administration announced a $2.5 billion fund to help bankroll the buildout of the nation’s high-voltage transmission system. I cited a May 10, 2022, press release from the Department of Energy which said:

Independent estimates indicate that we need to expand electricity transmission systems by 60% by 2030, and may need to triple it by 2050 to meet the country’s increase in renewable generation and expanding electrification needs.”

Also, in February 2023, the Department of Energy released the “National Transmission Needs Study,” which claims the U.S. needs to build 47,300 gigawatt-miles of new power lines by 2035. The study didn’t define gigawatt-miles. But it did say that “in future scenarios with moderate load but high clean energy assumptions,” the U.S. will need “a 57% growth in today’s transmission system.” Given that the current grid has about 240,000 miles of high-voltage capacity, that would require building roughly 136,000 miles of new capacity. The same report says, “By 2040, new transmission deployment is projected between 100,000 and 185,000 GW-mi (115,000 GW-mi median), a doubling in size of today’s transmission system.”

Last November, Jesse Jenkins, who heads the Zero Lab at Princeton University, told Utility Dive that “By 2035 alone we’re going to need to add about 75,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines, enough to run from New York City to Los Angeles and back 15 times…That sounds like a lot for a country not used to building big things. But we have built big things in the past, this is not unprecedented, and shouldn’t be viewed as impossible.”

Jenkins may be correct that it “shouldn’t be viewed as impossible.” But the odds  of the U.S. building 75,000 miles of new high-voltage transmission over the next 10 years are, as my father used to say, “slim and none, and Slim left town.”

The math here is so simple even a Ph.D. could do it. Jenkins claims the U.S. must build 75,000 miles of transmission in 10 years, or 7,500 miles per year. But there’s no precedent — none — for adding that much capacity. Indeed, constructing that much new transmission would require a four-fold increase in the average number of line miles built annually since 2008. Furthermore, that pace of new capacity would have to be sustained for a decade.

The hard truth about the alt-energy/net-zero/energy transition hype is that almost no one — including Doerr, DOE, Jenkins, reporters at big media outlets, pundits, and others — has bothered to do the math. They did not calculate how much transmission we are building every year or how long it may take to achieve significant expansions of the power grid. In other words, it’s easy to talk about adding transmission capacity. But building high-power lines is hard. Really hard. And the cost of building them is soaring.

According to C Three, recently acquired by Yes Energy, each mile of new high-voltage capacity added to the grid in 2023 cost about $3.95 million. As seen in the figure above, that’s nearly triple the per-mile cost recorded in 2008. During a recent phone interview, C Three’s president and founder, Jean Reaves Rollins, told me that “a big chunk” of the surge in costs “is due to the soaring cost of acquiring right of way and dealing with permits and regulatory compliance.” Rollins, who has worked in the utility sector for decades, said building any high-power infrastructure is challenging. For instance, installing a 345kV substation, she said, can take three to five years. It requires experienced linemen, engineers, and lots of heavy equipment. “These big infrastructure projects don’t happen quickly. The grid is enormously complex,” she said. “It requires hundreds of suppliers and a lot of complicated engineering, not to mention acquiring rights of way.”

Rollins is doubtful that significant quantities of new greenfield transmission will be built in the next few years. “About the only way to add new capacity today is to upgrade the existing high-voltage transmission line you have,” she said.

In addition to the cost and difficulty of acquiring rights of way, electric utilities across the country are seeing staggering cost increases in the products they need to maintain and upgrade the grid. Matt Brandrup, the CEO of the Wisconsin-based Rural Electric Supply Cooperative, recently sent me the latest information on price increases for commodities like conductor and transformers.

Brandrup, who was on the Power Hungry Podcast last March, told me that “RESCO’s 2023 average electric utility product cost inflation rate on the distribution and transmission products we sell (transformers, underground/overhead conductor, related hardware, poles, etc) finished at just over 10%.” He noted that over the past three years, “Transformers (single-phase transformers that feed the homes and small business and the larger three-phase transformers that feed the larger businesses and industrial type of loads) have all increased by 50 to 75% depending upon the manufacturer.” He continued, noting that the cost of primary underground conductor, the wire used in main underground circuits, has jumped by 50%, and the cost of overhead conductor (the wire used to feed pole-mounted transformers) has increased by 45%.

As seen above, utility product costs have climbed steadily since 2017. Brandrup broke down the impact of this inflation on electric coops and other electricity providers. “A $10,000,000 work plan budget (total cost of materials purchased by that member) in 2020 would now cost our member $14,800,000 in 2024 if they purchased the same exact material,” he said.

In addition to the construction and cost issues, transmission projects are being hindered by local opposition. In my May 26, 2023 piece, “47,300 Gigawatt-Miles From Nowhere,” I wrote about the 345 kV Cardinal-Hickory Creek transmission project that aims to move juice from Iowa to Wisconsin. That 102-mile project, which initiated public involvement in 2014, is now 98% complete. But it has been delayed by multiple legal challenges and is expected to cost $500 million, or roughly $5 million per mile, far more than the $3.9 million figure I cited above. The project includes 1.3 miles of wire that cross the Mississippi National Wildlife and Fish Refuge. In 2021, several conservation groups sued to stop the project. A lawyer for the plaintiffs explained the litigation is “really an effort to preserve our public conservation lands from encroachment from massive transmission lines and pipelines.”

In October, in an embarrassing move, the Bureau of Land Management rescinded approval of the Rock Creek Wind Gen-Tie transmission line in southeast Wyoming after the Albany County Conservancy sued it. As reported in Cowboy State Daily, the line:  

Was proposed to connect the Rock Creek Wind project to two larger transmission lines that will carry wind energy out of Wyoming. The lawsuit claimed the approval process was improperly done, without required public notification and without opportunities for public participation, including public comments. All of that is required as part of the National Environmental Policy Act.

Last month,  the San Carlos Apache tribe, Tohono O’odham Nation, the Center for Biological Diversity, and Tucson-based Archaelogy Southwest sued to stop the construction of a $10 billion high-voltage transmission project that aims to connect a wind project in New Mexico to consumers in southern Arizona. The groups filed suit in federal court alleging that the U.S. Bureau of Land Management failed to comply with federal statutes when it approved the 500-kV  SunZia Southwest Transmission Project. The 32-page complaint alleges the $8 billion project will cause “serious, irreversible adverse effects on Tribal cultural sites and sacred areas, including areas with human remains.” They are seeking a restraining order or injunction to stop the project and require federal agencies to adhere to the provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act and Administrative Procedures Act.

On February 6, two Minnesota counties — Meeker and Chippewa — adopted one-year moratoriums on wind and solar projects because local regulators were concerned that the projects would result in the construction of transmission lines across their counties.

There’s also widespread opposition on the East Coast to the proposed transmission projects needed to bring power ashore from offshore wind projects.

I could cite many more examples of the opposition to transmission here. But the punchline here is obvious: the high-voltage grid is expanding very slowly, the costs associated with it are soaring, and the opposition to such a vast expansion is real and growing.

These facts indicate that the “energy transition” to a grid mainly powered by far-flung wind and solar projects will not happen. That means we must use the existing rights of way and wires to the fullest extent possible. I will close by repeating what I wrote last year in “47,300 Gigawatt-Miles From Nowhere.” I explained we won’t see a quick expansion of the high-voltage grid:

Because of the physical limits on the system. Given these limits, policymakers aiming to decarbonize the electric sector should be looking at ways to utilize existing infrastructure, including wires and transformers, by building new nuclear plants on the sites where coal- or gas-fired power plants are being retired. That’s what TerraPower hopes to do in Kemmerer, Wyoming and other locations. In short, the electric grid we have today is largely the electric grid we are going to have. We should not be spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build a grid designed to accommodate the low power density of weather-dependent renewables like wind and solar. Instead, we should be building high-power-density, weather-resilient generation that can exploit our existing grid. That, of course, means nuclear energy.

What I wrote last May still applies today. If we are serious about reducing CO2 emissions from the electric sector, that means building lots and lots of nuclear reactors. Building lots of new nuclear won’t be cheap, quick, or easy. But it will be far more manageable (and probably more affordable) than trying to string tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines across the American West.

Climate alarmists like Senator Whitehouse are fueling anxiety in young people

In Episode 418 of District of Conservation, Gabriella discusses the NYC City Council mulling a tide pod ban under the guise of curbing microplastic pollution and how climate activists are inducing anxiety in the public. Tune in to learn more!

From CFACT

By Gabriella Hoffman

“In the most critical cases, climate anxiety disrupts the ability to function day to day. Children and young people in this category feel alienation from friends and family, distress when thinking about the future and intrusive thoughts about who will survive, according to Hickman’s research. Patients obsessively check for extreme weather, read climate change studies, and pursue radical activism. Some, devastatingly, consider suicide as the only solution.” — Bloomberg Green

In Episode 418 of District of Conservation, Gabriella discusses the NYC City Council mulling a tide pod ban under the guise of curbing microplastic pollution and how climate activists are inducing anxiety in the public. Tune in to learn more!

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

⁠NYC Villanizes Tide Pods In Effort To Combat Microplastics Pollution⁠

⁠Pods Are Plastic Bill ⁠

⁠Microplastics Are a Big—and Growing—Part of Global Pollution⁠

⁠Climate Change Is Fueling a New Type of Anxiety, Therapists Say⁠

⁠NIH: The psychology of climate anxiety⁠

⁠Unhinged Sheldon Whitehouse Tweet

⁠

Britain must work with EU to halt onslaught of Chinese EVs, warns Renault

Britain and Europe must work together to resist an onslaught of cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), the boss of Renault has warned.

Car makers on the Continent struggle with slowing demand and cheaper competition.

Britain and Europe must work together to resist an onslaught of cheap Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), the boss of Renault has warned.

Luca de Meo, chief executive of the French car maker, said the switch to greener vehicles posed the biggest challenge to the industry in 150 years, but warned companies were being over-regulated and lacked financial support. The Telegraph has the story.

He accused European governments of focusing on “deadlines and fines” while the US and China backed their homegrown automotive companies with generous subsidies and supportive industrial policies.

His comments come as car makers on the Continent struggle with slowing demand for EVs and the threat of cheaper competition from China.

China surpassed Japan last year to become the world’s biggest exporter of cars, with more than 460,000 Chinese-made vehicles registered in Europe during the first nine months of 2023.

A shipment of 5,000 electric vehicles made by Shenzhen-based BYD is currently on its way to Europe, according to reports, aboard a cargo ship called Explorer.

The company has been busy acquiring its own fleet of special car-carrier ships following a global shortage of the vessels, which has been constraining Chinese exports.

Critics have long argued that while the UK and the European Union have focused heavily on banning future petrol car sales by 2035, they have offered comparatively little in the way of incentives for consumers to switch to EVs.

Writing in an op-ed for the magazine Autocar, Mr Meo said: “For us Europeans, these are challenging times. But are we fully aware of what is at stake?

“The UK may no longer be part of the EU, but on this issue I think we face the same challenges together.

“It is very simple: strip out the automotive industry and Europe will find itself with a structural trade deficit.

“With the internal combustion engine, our leadership was undisputed. For a century, we benefited from our expertise with this technology, and it was a barrier to entry for newcomers to the industry.

“Today, Europeans find themselves in a position of relative fragility.”

Mr Meo criticised flip-flopping on rules for vehicle emissions and pointed to China’s global dominance over battery production, warning that previous certainties were being “shaken”.

Last year, Rishi Sunak delayed the UK’s ban on sales of new petrol cars from 2030 to 2035, while the EU also watered down emissions rules due to come into force in 2035 to allow cars powered by synthetic fuels to continue being sold, following last-minute demands from Germany.

Mr Meo added: “In addition, while the Americans massively stimulate and incentivise the industry and the Chinese organise it through planning, we Europeans regulate, often with no coherence and without any holistic view of our challenges.”

Europe needs a “one stop shop” for regulation on zero-emission vehicles, rather than different rules in various countries, he said, as well as more government support for companies.

Read the full story here.

‘On The Edge Of What Is Bearable’: Why Are European Farmers Protesting?

Farmers have risen up in protest across Europe to slam national and European Union (EU) climate policies that threaten their economic interests.

From The Daily Caller

NICK POPE

CONTRIBUTOR

  • European farmers across the continent have protested against national governments and the European Union (EU) over cheap imports and green agricultural policies that are undermining their livelihoods. 
  • Countries including Germany, Spain, Poland, Italy and the Czech Republic have all engaged in disruptive demonstrations to vent their frustrations.
  • “We’re going to increase the pressure because it’s clear that the proposals we are seeing from the EU and the Spanish government are purely cosmetic and do not resolve the problems of farmers,” Luis Cortés, the leader of a major Spanish agricultural trade union, told The Telegraph.

Farmers have risen up in protest across Europe to slam national and European Union (EU) climate policies that threaten their economic interests.

Czech farmers descended upon the streets of Prague on Monday in their tractors, protesting burdensome regulations and green policies that are adding to inflationary stress that the farmers assert is ruining their livelihoods, according to Euronews. The Czech farmers’ protests are the latest in a wave of similar demonstrations across Europe lashing out against EU climate policies, coming on the heels of outcries in Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany, Hungary, France and the Netherlands.

The farmers are enraged that the EU has attempted to inject climate policies into agricultural practices at a time when poor macroeconomic conditions are already straining their ability to compete with farmers from other places who are able to sell their products for less, according to numerous reports.

The European Commission — the de facto executive arm of the EU — sets what is known as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which sets standards and the guidelines for agricultural subsidies that govern European farming. The most recent CAP went into effect on January 1, 2023, and it is specifically designed to force the European agricultural sector into closer compliance with the European Green Deal.

The European Green Deal calls for a 50% reduction in the use of certain pesticides by 2030, and the European Commission is pushing to achieve a 90% reduction in emissions by 2040 in a move that would substantially alter how European farmers manage their farms. (RELATED: Germany Went All In On The Green Transition. Now, Its Economy Is Crumbling)

In Prague, farmers are rallying against stifling bureaucratic supervision of their operations and climate regulations that they assert make their products artificially more expensive than imports from outside of the EU, according to Reuters.

“We came today mainly because of the bureaucracy around farming, the paperwork is on the edge of what is bearable,” Lukas Melichovsky, a Czech farmer, told Reuters on Monday.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala suggested that the protesters are aligned with the Kremlin, referencing the fact that the nation’s leading agricultural unions have largely distanced themselves from the demonstrations.

Hundreds of Italian farmers ventured to Rome in early February to vent similar frustrations, deriding the EU’s efforts to impose climate policy into agricultural production while not doing enough to level the playing field with non-EU products subject to less stringent regulatory regimes, according to Politico.

Protesting farmers displayed signs and placards with slogans like “Unfair Market — You Are Taking Away Our Dignity!” and “No Farmers, No Food!” while they demonstrated, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, in Spain, farmers staged disruptive protests for more than two weeks in February, blockading highways and distribution hubs to demonstrate their displeasure with the new CAP, according to The Telegraph.

“We have to leave 11 per cent of our land unsown or fallow, but we still have overheads and pay taxes; it’s absurd,” Luis Cortés, the leader of a major Spanish agricultural trade union, told The Telegraph.

“We’re going to increase the pressure because it’s clear that the proposals we are seeing from the EU and the Spanish government are purely cosmetic and do not resolve the problems of farmers,” Cortés said, adding that the CAP has been “catastrophic” in part because “subsidies have decreased while environmental measures increase.”

Polish farmers also continued a wave of disruptive protests into February, blocking border crossings with Ukraine to highlight perceived trade imbalances and criticizing elements of the EU Green Deal, according to multiple outlets. The country’s leading agricultural unions backed the demonstrations, unlike in Italy and Poland, Euractiv reported.

“We oppose restrictions that the European Green Deal would impose on us and the influx of low-quality Ukrainian food to Poland under the liberalized EU trade rules,” one unnamed Polish apple farmer, who did not engage in the protests but supports the message, told Euractiv.

The EU extended the suspension of tariffs against certain Ukrainian agricultural goods at the end of January, justifying the decision as standing in solidarity with Ukraine while it tries to repel the ongoing Russian invasion, according to Euractiv. (RELATED: Europe Imposes First-Ever Climate Tax On Imported Goods)

Hungarian farmers launched their own simultaneous protests in conjunction with those seen in Poland, for nearly the same exact reasons, according to Euronews.

German farmers launched a massive, week-long protest in January to push back against the German government’s plans to slash key agricultural subsidies to plug a 17 billion euro budget gap and maintain funding for green initiatives.

The German government warned that extreme right-wing elements were co-opting the demonstrations.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s leading right-wing populist party, supported the protests. The party has seen its popularity rise significantly since Russia invaded Ukraine, and it is now the second-most popular political party in Germany, according to polling data aggregated by Politico.

French farmers also rose up in January and early February, blockading roadways across the country to cause disruption and protest stifling regulations and cheap imports undercutting their share of the market, according to France24. Demonstrators sprayed manure on government buildings to express their discontent, according to The Associated Press.

About one in every five French farms went under between 2010 and 2020, according to France24.

Dutch farmers engaged in similar protests in November 2023, preempting the wave of demonstrations that has marked the first two months of 2024 elsewhere in Europe. The farmers were enraged by the government’s plans to reduce the amount of livestock in the country by about 50% and shutter major farms in order to come into compliance with EU nitrogen emissions regulations, according to The Economist, and their protests precipitated the unexpected electoral victory of right-wing populist Geert Wilders in November 2023.

The European Commission did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

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PETM Caused by Passing Star?

Paradigms and ruling theories drive scientists to looking for specific answers. And they tend to only see what they “shine a light on.”

From Watts Up With That?

Guest “Paradigm shift” by David Middleton

Figure 1. Geologic time scale. (ICS)

The Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a geologically brief spike in temperatures, during the warmest climatic episode of the Cenozoic Era.

We are often told that the warmth of the Early Paleogene was driven by CO2; and that the cool-down from the Late Paleogene, into the Neogene and Quaternary Periods was driven by a draw-down of atmospheric CO2; however there is scant evidence for this hypothesis[1][2]. Despite the paucity of geological evidence, the notion of a CO2-driven climate has apparently become a paradigm.

This paradigm didn’t exist in the 1970’s.

Suggestion that changing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could be a major factor in climate change dates from 1861, when it was proposed by British physicist John Tyndall.

[…]

Unfortunately we cannot estimate accurately changes of past CO2 content of either atmosphere or oceans, nor is there any firm quantitative basis for estimating the the magnitude of drop in carbon dioxide content necessary to trigger glaciation.  Moreover the entire concept of an atmospheric greenhouse effect is controversial, for the rate of ocean-atmosphere equalization is uncertain.Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten. Evolution of the Earth. McGraw-Hill, Inc. Second Edition 1976. p. 441.

While methods of estimating past CO2 levels have improved, the Early Paleogene is still poorly understood, with estimates ranging from 300 to 3,500 ppm.

Figure 2a. Cenozoic temperature (Zachos et al., 2001) and CO2 reconstructions. Mmarine pCO2 (foram boron δ11B, alkenone δ13C), atmospheric CO2 from plant stomata (green and yellow diamonds with red outlines), Mauna Loa instrumental CO2 (thick red line) and Cenozoic temperature change from benthic foram δ18O (light gray line). Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), Early Eocene Climatic Optimum (EECO), Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum (MECO), Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum (MMCO).
Figure 2b. Legend for Figure 3a.

The recent publication by The Cenozoic CO2 Proxy Integration Project (CenCO2PIP) Consortium failed to significantly reduce Paleogene uncertainty despite claims to the contrary.

Figure 3. Cenozoic Era CO2 and temperature.
(The Cenozoic CO2 Proxy Integration Project (CenCO2PIP) Consortium)

Why geologists are supposed to avoid paradigms

Figure 4. You only find what you’re looking for. (JC at the National Press Club)

When I was studying geology, way back when The Ice Age Cometh in the 1970’s, we were taught to avoid getting hooked on paradigms or “ruling theories”. Geology, as a science, has very few unique solutions. This is why we were were taught to embrace Chamberlin’s Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses. I have to assume that either this is no longer the case or that homage must be paid to the current paradigm in order to get published. The CenCO2PIP Consortium embraced it BIG TIME.

The consortium’s members did not collect new data; rather, they came together to sort through published studies to assess their reliability, based on evolving knowledge. They excluded some that that they found outdated or incomplete in the light of new findings, and recalibrated others to account for the latest analytical techniques. Then they calculated a new 66-million-year curve of CO2 versus temperatures based on all the evidence so far, coming to a consensus on what they call “earth system sensitivity.” By this measure, they say, a doubling of CO2 is predicted to warm the planet a whopping 5 to 8 degrees C.Columbia Climate School: Climate, Earth and Society

Paradigms and ruling theories drive scientists to looking for specific answers. And they tend to only see what they “shine a light on.” The current paradigm is that CO2 has driven climate change over the Phanerozoic Eon (the past ~540 MY).

  1. The Paleocene-Eocene was, on average, 4–15 °C warmer than today.
  2. Atmospheric CO2 was very likely in the 450-600 ppm range.
  3. Modern climate models would require 4,500 ppm CO2 to simulate the Paleocene-Eocene temperature range.

Therefore the equilibrium climate sensitivity must be 5-8 °C per doubling of atmospheric CO2, rather than the observation-supported 2.3 °C per doubling (a transient climate response of only 1.2-1.6 °C).

It never seems to occur to them that something completely different drove climate change over geologic time.

“And now for something completely different…”

Earth’s Orbit Mysteriously Altered by Chance Encounter Million of Years Ago

SPACE 19 February 2024

By MICHELLE STARR

A grazing encounter between the Solar System and a passing star could once have changed Earth’s orbit enough to wreak havoc on the climate, new research has found.

Around 56 million years ago, at the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene, Earth’s temperature warmed by up to 8 °C (14.4 °F).

This has always been a bit of a puzzle – but planetary scientist Nathan Kaib of the Planetary Science Institute and astrophysicist Sean Raymond of the Laboratory of Astrophysics of Bordeaux suggest a chance encounter may have been the culprit.

Their simulations show that a star passing by the Solar System could have introduced enough disruption to planetary orbits to nudge Earth slightly off course.

“One reason this is important is because the geologic record shows that changes in the Earth’s orbital eccentricity accompany fluctuations in the Earth’s climate,” Kaib says.

“If we want to best search for the causes of ancient climate anomalies, it is important to have an idea of what Earth’s orbit looked like during those episodes.”

[…]

Kaib and Raymond wanted to know if a passing star could have a similar effect, even from a significant distance. Their work focused on a single known event. Some 2.8 million years ago, a Sun-like star called HD 7977 passed the Solar System, potentially so closely that it flew inside the Oort Cloud.

[…]

HD 7977 is one star, and the only flyby we can confidently identify. But scientists have estimated that a star passes by within 50,000 astronomical units every million years or so, and within 10,000 astronomical units every 20 million years or so.

This means that it’s entirely possible that a passing star has affected Earth’s climate in the past – and may even have played a role in the thermal maximum.

[…]Science Alert

The full text of their paper is available and worth reading.

5. HD 7977 and the Paleoclimate

It is clear that the stellar passages expected within the solar neighborhood significantly influence the orbital evolution of the Sun’s planets, and we now assess the effects of a specific encounter known to have occurred. Among past stellar encounters inferred from Gaia Data Release 3, HD 7977 stands out as potentially the closest recent known encounter. This 1.1 M⊙ star passed near the solar system ∼2.8 Myr ago at ∼27 km s−1 (Bailer-Jones 2022; Gaia Collaboration et al. 2023). Although this encounter’s median inferred impact parameter is ∼13,200 au, there is a large amount of uncertainty, with a 5% probability of passage within ∼3900 au. This range of impact parameter corresponds to over 1 order of magnitude variation in impulse gradient (which governs the level of planetary perturbation).Kaib and Raymond, 2024

What happened ~about 2.8 million years ago (MYA)? The onset of Pleistocene Epoch (~2.58 MYA) and the coldest climate since the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (formerly Karoo Ice Age) 330-280 MYA.

Figure 5. High latitude SST (°C) from benthic foram δ18O (Zachos, et al., 2001) and HadSST3 ( Hadley Centre / UEA CRU via http://www.woodfortrees.org) plotted at same scale, tied at 1950 AD.

While it’s clear that plate tectonics and the changing configurations of continents and ocean basins have been primary drivers of past climate change… It’s also quite possible that astrophysical phenomena related to our solar system’s peregrinations around the Milky Way galaxy have also been primary drivers of paleoclimate change. Our solar system’s crossings of the galaxy’s spiral arms have been linked to the major Phanerozoic ice ages (Shaviv & Veizer, 2004, Shaviv, Svenmarsk & Veizer, 2022) and the formation of continental cratons (Kirkland, et al., 2022). While we can effectively measure the Milankovitch Cycles and have correlated them to Pleistocene glacial-interglacial stages, phenomena like our solar system’s crossings of the galaxy’s spiral arms and interactions with rogue stars are much more difficult to nail down… It’s just easier to blame ExxonMobil for whatever the weather does.

References

Berner, R.A. and Z. Kothavala, 2001. “GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time”, American Journal of Science, v.301, pp.182-204, February 2001.

Dott, Robert H. & Roger L. Batten.  Evolution of the Earth.  McGraw-Hill, Inc.  Second Edition 1976.  p. 441.

Kaib, Nathan A. and Sean N. Raymond 2024 ApJL 962 L28DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ad24fb

Kirkland, C.L., P.J. Sutton, T. Erickson, T.E. Johnson, M.I.H. Hartnady, H. Smithies, M. Prause; Did transit through the galactic spiral arms seed crust production on the early Earth?. Geology 2022;; 50 (11): 1312–1317. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G50513.1

[1] Middleton, David H. “A Clean Kill of the Carbon Dioxide-Driven Climate Change Hypothesis?” WUWT. 25 September 2019.

[2] Middleton, David H. “Middle Miocene Volcanism, Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change”. WUWT. 3 June 2019.

Pagani, Mark, Michael Arthur & Katherine Freeman. (1999). “Miocene evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide”. Paleoceanography. 14. 273-292. 10.1029/1999PA900006.

Pearson, P. N. and Palmer, M. R.: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past 60 million years, Nature, 406, 695–699,https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.

Royer, et al., 2001. Paleobotanical Evidence for Near Present-Day Levels of Atmospheric CO2 During Part of the Tertiary. Science 22 June 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.112

[Link] Royer, D. L., R. A. Berner, I. P. Montanez, N. J. Tabor and D. J. Beerling. “CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate”.  GSA Today, Vol. 14, No. 3. (2004), pp. 4-10

Shaviv, N., & Veizer, J. (2004). CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate: Comment. GSA Today, 14, 18.

Shaviv, N. J., Svensmark, H., & Veizer, J. (2023). The phanerozoic climate. Annals of the new York Academy of Sciences, 1519, 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14920

[Link] Steinthorsdottir, M., Vajda, V., Pole, M., and Holdgate, G., 2019, “Moderate levels of Eocene pCO2 indicated by Southern Hemisphere fossil plant stomata”: Geology, v. 47, p. 914–918, https://doi.org/10.1130/G46274.1

The Cenozoic CO2 Proxy Integration Project (CenCO2PIP) Consortium*† ,Toward a Cenozoic history of atmospheric CO2.Science382,eadi5177(2023).DOI:10.1126/science.adi5177

Tripati, A.K., C.D. Roberts, and R.A. Eagle. 2009.  “Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years”.  Science, Vol. 326, pp. 1394 1397, 4 December 2009.  DOI: 10.1126/science.1178296

Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, K. “Trends, rhythms, and aberrations in global climate 65 Ma to present”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).

Britain to miss net zero target despite billions of investment, warn analysts

Britain will still depend on oil and gas for a third of its energy in its net zero target year of 2050 despite billions of pounds of investment, according to a report from leading energy analysts.

UK will still depend on oil and gas for a third of its energy in 2050, report reveals.

Britain will still depend on oil and gas for a third of its energy in its net zero target year of 2050 despite billions of pounds of investment, according to a report from leading energy analysts.

The UK is massively behind schedule with its plans for offshore wind farms, nuclear power stations, solar farms and other low carbon energy sources needed to replace oil and gas, experts at DNV said. 

It means that by 2050 – when successive prime ministers have pledged the UK will hit net zero – it will still be pouring 125m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, according to the DNV report. The Telegraph has the story.

The analysts said: “The UK looks set to miss both its ‘Net Zero by 2050’ target and its decarbonization commitments for 2030 … Our forecast shows that the UK’s annual emissions will amount to some 125m tonnes of CO2e in 2050.”

Their report pinpointed three key sources for future emissions, with transport at the top of the list.

It said: “In transport, a sizeable proportion of vehicles, particularly commercial ones, will continue to be fossil-fuelled in 2050. Aviation will continue to emit significantly due to the slow penetration of low-carbon fuels by 2050.”

The rate at which the UK is switching heating for buildings from gas to electric was also far too slow, said the report.

It said that natural gas will still comprise over 50pc of final energy demand for buildings in 2050, adding: “There is clearly an opportunity for government to act more forcefully on the decarbonization of domestic heating.”

DNV’s study showed that the UK currently gets about 80pc of its total energy from oil and gas – roughly the same proportion as two decades ago.

By 2031 this will have declined only slightly, to around 70pc of  total energy – a drop of just 10pc – despite spending £46bn on Hinkley Point C nuclear power station and billions of pounds more on windfarms, solar farms and battery storage systems.

Hari Vamadevan, UK regional director for energy at DNV, said: “Without immediate action the UK will fail to deliver on its climate commitments, fall behind in the global race to decarbonise and  miss out on many of the benefits that switching to a low-carbon system will bring.

“But, by putting the correct policy levers in place, there is still time for industry and government to deliver a transition that is good for business, good for consumers and good for the planet.”

DNV’s warnings are supported by separate research from Energy UK, the trade body for power suppliers, showing the UK faces a serious shortfall in its 2030 offshore wind targets.

Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has set a target of expanding offshore wind from 14 Gigawatts (GW) to 50GW by 2030. It means installing one or two turbines every day for the next six years.

Read the full story here.

El Nino Keeps Ocean Warm January 2024

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof of their Zero Carbon agenda, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures.  It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

  • The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
  • SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
  • Major El Ninos have been the dominant climate feature in recent years.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated.  HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3.  The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4.  More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through December 2023.  A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes.  That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period.  

Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean.   Oct./Nov. temps dropped  in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. After an uptick in December, temps in January 2023 dropped everywhere, strongest in NH, with the Global anomaly further below the mean since 2015.

Then came El Nino as shown by the upward spike in the Tropics since January, the anomaly nearly tripling from 0.38C to 1.09C.  In September 2023, all regions rose, especially NH up from 0.70C to 1.41C, pulling up the global anomaly to a new high for this period. But then in October anomalies in all regions started dropping down bringing down the Global anomaly.  By December, NH cooled to 1.1C and the Global anomaly down to 0.94C from its peak of 1.10C, despite slight warming in SH and Tropics.

Now in January both Tropics and SH rose, resulting Global Anomaly going higher. Tropics anomaly reached a new peak of 1.29C. Note that all ocean regions are now higher than 01/2016, the previous peak.

Comment:

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof of their Zero Carbon agenda, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures.  It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.  Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:

El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years.  Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on.  Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds.  As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century  It is well understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.

Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world.   We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example.  So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.

It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well.  One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.

A longer view of SSTs

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations.  Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015.  This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since.  The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies.  Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino. 

The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2. 

SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8,  a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12.  Again SSTs are average 2013-14.

Now a different pattern appears.  The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off.  But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average.  In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16.  NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.)  Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021.  In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.  

Now in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH has produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year. In fact, October and now November are showing that this number is likely the crest, despite El Nino driving the Tropics anomaly close to 1998 and 2015 peaks.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH.  The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before.  After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

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 that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has data through October.  It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic.  “ERSST5 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 sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.

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. Now in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before decling.  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 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an  extraordinary peak in July.  August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C. January 2024 is unchanged from the previous month.

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4. 

The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.18.  The orange line the average 1980-202306, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-202306, value 0.64. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.

Curiosity:  Solar Coincidence?

The news about our current solar cycle 25 is that the solar activity is hitting peak numbers now and higher  than expected 1-2 years in the future.  As livescience put it:  Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun’s chaotic peak be?  Some charts from spaceweatherlive look familar to these sea surface temperature charts.

Summary

The oceans are driving the warming this century.  SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.”  The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect.  The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?

Space weather impacts the ionosphere in this animation. Credits: NASA/GSFC/CIL/Krystofer Kim

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean