Day: March 1, 2024

Rural America set to be transformed by up to 55 million-acre federal solar plan

Solar energy’s appetite for vast amounts of land has prompted the Biden administration to propose designating as much as 55 million acres of public lands as potential sites for industrial-scale solar farms.

From CFACT

By Kevin Stocklin:

Solar energy’s appetite for vast amounts of land has prompted the Biden administration to propose designating as much as 55 million acres of public lands as potential sites for industrial-scale solar farms.

That’s an area larger than 36 states and similar in size to Idaho or Minnesota.

An updated initiative by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), called the Western Solar Plan, proposes six alternatives for solar development.

In the most aggressive of these scenarios, 55 million acres across 11 Western states would be made available for solar energy. The least aggressive alternative would designate 8 million acres for that purpose.

The BLM’s “preferred alternative” falls halfway between the two, setting aside 22 million acres for solar development.

In total, the BLM manages 162 million acres of public land designated as “multi-use.” These multiple uses include farming, ranching, hunting and fishing, hiking and camping, drilling, and mining—and more recently, wind and solar installations and transmission lines to connect them to the grid.

The BLM, a division of the Department of the Interior, states that, in order to carry out the Biden administration’s goal of generating 25 gigawatts (GW) of electricity from wind and solar on public lands by 2025—and generating 100 percent “renewable” electricity by 2035—solar panels would need to be sited on 700,000 acres of public land.

More than 3 million solar panels are required to produce 1 GW of electricity, according to the Department of Energy. One GW can power 500,000 to 750,000 homes on average, assuming a constant supply of energy generation and use.

“The Interior Department’s work … is crucial to achieving the Biden–Harris administration’s goal of a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035,” Laura Daniel-Davis, acting deputy secretary of the Interior, said in a Jan. 17 statement.

“And this updated solar roadmap will help us get there in more states and on more lands across the West,” she said.

The states targeted for solar development include Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. This initiative is part of a wider effort to satiate the demand for land from solar companies.

The sheer scope of the BLM plan—designating tens of millions of acres for solar development when the agency says 700,000 acres would suffice to meet Biden administration goals—is a red flag for many communities.

Dylan Hoyt, the planning program manager in the Utah Public Lands policy coordinating office, calls it “bad optics”.

“When I say bad optics, I mean when you tell me that I have 17,000 acres in Utah that’s set aside for solar, and now we’re going to jump to 3.7 or 1.5 million,” he told The Epoch Times.

“That looks terrible.”

Environmental groups and advocates for wind and solar energy applauded the plan. The Wilderness Society issued a statement that “in the face of climate pressure and the injustices of our current fossil fuel-based energy system, a rapid transition to a renewable energy economy is necessary”.

The Los Angeles Times published a supportive op-ed that stated: “Biden’s Western solar plan sounds scary, but it’s better than climate change.”

The article mentions Robert Moses, New York’s mid-20th-century unelected Parks and Recreation Commissioner, who was responsible for enormous urban planning projects, including parks, bridges, and highways that crisscrossed the state.

Among Mr. Moses’s more notorious mega-projects were highway systems such as the Cross Bronx Expressway that ran through urban communities and turned once-vibrant neighborhoods into slums.

A man walks across an overpass above the Cross Bronx Expressway, a notorious stretch of highway that is often choked with traffic and contributes to pollution and poor air quality, in New York City on Nov. 16, 2021. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

‘Destroying the Environment to Save It’

Some who are on the receiving end of the BLM’s solar plan say that, despite assurances from environmental groups, they remain concerned about the scale of this government development project and the amount of land that it would consume.

“They say we have to protect the environment, but they’re OK with destroying the environment to save it,” Gabriella Hoffman, policy analyst and host of the “District of Conservation” podcast, told The Epoch Times. “It makes no sense if you’re a conservationist.”

A report by The Nature Conservancy, published in May 2023, states that reaching the goal of net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 2050 by using wind and solar would require more than 250,000 square miles, or 160 million acres, of land, which is an area about the size of the state of Texas.

Some communities that find themselves in the path of the wind and solar industries say this is too high a price to pay for an uncertain benefit. Energy analyst Robert Bryce keeps a database of more than 600 local communities that have opposed wind and solar installations across the United States to date.

“This idea that we can save the environment by carpeting the rural landscape with oceans of solar panels and forests of wind turbines—it boggles the mind how climate activists can justify this,” he told The Epoch Times.

To subdue local resistance, some states, most recently Michigan, are writing new laws that prevent local communities from blocking wind and solar projects. However, some in the Western states say they still expect significant pushback to the BLM plan.

“It’s definitely going to impact wildlife,” Mr. Hoyt said. And not only an impact on species that live in the designated solar zones but also on those that migrate through them.

“There’s definitely going to be conflicts with ranchers, there could be conflicts with access to public lands depending on where it’s built, and there could be potential conflicts with the mining industry,” he said.

“States didn’t really have a say in the goals in the first place, which I think is disconcerting because the states represent the citizens.”

A solar farm sits next to a housing development in Columbia, Mo., on March 15, 2023. The Biden administration wants the United States to generate 100 percent “renewable” electricity by 2035. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

From Multi-Use to Single-Use

One of the prime target states for solar development is Nevada, both because of the amount of sunlight it receives and because of its proximity to California and Las Vegas, with their ever-expanding demands for electricity.

The federal government owns 85 percent of Nevada’s land, most of which is desert, but residents dispute the notion that it is devoid of wildlife and say they are concerned about the sheer scale of BLM’s solar plan.

“Nevada is hard-rock mining country,” Andy Rieber, a public lands consultant residing in Nevada, told The Epoch Times, “but the average footprint in Nevada for mining disturbance is less than 1,000 acres.

“Looking at the proposed solar developments in the state of Nevada, there are a few small ones, but most of them are running around 4,000 to 5,000 acres,” he said. “There’s one standout project that is a complex of seven contiguous facilities and would encompass approximately 62,000 acres, which is a lot of land.”

And while many climate activists wouldn’t shed a tear at the loss of mining, drilling, and cattle farming, local communities say they depend on them for food, energy, jobs, and tax revenue.

“With the oil and gas industry, there’s a royalty on everything that comes out of the ground, and a percentage of that ends up going back to the counties,” Mr. Hoyt said. “With solar, that doesn’t exist.”

“They come in, they build on federal lands, and they pay a permit fee to the Bureau of Land Management, but the local economy gets nothing,” he said.

While the BLM initiative touts “environmental justice” among its guiding principles, people in targeted states worry that poorer rural communities will feel the impact of solar development but that the electricity produced will be delivered to wealthier urban centers in states such as California.

“Yes, we need to be considerate of environmental impacts,” Mr. Hoyt said. “But at the same time, we’re coming in and we’re putting a huge transmission line and a solar field, and then when it’s done those people still have it there and have to look at it and live with it, but they get nothing from it.”

Another issue that many cite with using multi-use public lands for solar is that solar energy crowds out other uses on the land.

“One of the things that is unique about solar development is that it doesn’t really play well with others,” Mr. Rieber said.

“If you have a grazing allotment, a lot of things can go on in and around that, including recreation, even mining,” he said. “But a large solar installation is going to take a big chunk of land out of multiple-use circulation because you can’t do anything else with it; it’s a singular use.”

Because utility-size solar installations such as the ones contemplated by BLM blanket entire areas with solar panels, often wiping out the vegetation and wildlife in those areas, both above ground and beneath it, they often displace farming, grazing, hunting, and recreation while also preventing drilling and mining.

“We always try to have multiple use and sustained yield since 1976; that’s what Congress told us to do,” Mr. Hoyt said. That was the year that the Federal Land Policy and Management Act was passed, specifying how federal multi-use lands were to be administered.

“But when solar comes in on these federally managed public lands, you lose that multiple-use component,” he said. “We want it [solar] to be part of the portfolio, and if we can do that with the minimum amount of conflict possible, that would be ideal.”

An Alternative Proposal

In response to the BLM’s solar plans, several agencies in western states have developed their own proposal, called “Smart from the Start”.

The idea behind it is essentially to limit solar development to so-called brownfield sites, such as closed landfills, superfund sites, and shuttered mines.

This plan provides a more specific definition of “disturbed lands” and would limit solar development to disturbed lands and “low conflict lands,” and would exclude wildlife habitats and migration corridors, locations near farms or residential areas, and lands that are in use for farming, ranching, tourism, recreation, or industry.

“I think it actually creates a template for locating solar in the most reasonable areas that would preserve habitat,” Mr. Rieber said. “That represents good planning, smart planning.”

So far, however, “the BLM has decided not to carry this alternative forward,” he said. “I would say that this is a very disappointing reaction.”

According to the BLM’s Western Solar Plan, the Smart From the Start alternative was dismissed as “substantially similar” to terms already in the BLM plan.

But state officials say there are substantial differences, arguing that Smart From the Start offers more precise criteria of what land should qualify for development and that it would make far less land available for development than the BLM’s preferred alternative of 22 million acres.

The Epoch Times reached out to the BLM to comment on this and other issues regarding its Western Solar Plan. The BLM responded with links to fact sheets and the plan but declined an interview.

Local officials say that plans for energy development must include not only a diverse array of energy sources but also a significant portion of “base load” energy, such as nuclear, gas, and coal, that can be ramped up and down as needed to balance out weather-dependent sources like wind and solar. And they say that needs to be done while minimizing the impact on public lands.

“Utah doesn’t have a lot of oil, but we do have pretty phenomenal geothermal resources,” Mr. Hoyt said. “A geothermal plant that could power the same amount of energy as a solar field that maybe takes up 640 acres might take somewhere around 40 acres, so it’s a significantly smaller impact.”

“For oil, because of the more modern technologies that we’re seeing with fracking, you don’t have to put as many wells in as you used to, so you can have that smaller footprint, and you can also have a lot of what we call no-surface disturbance,” he said. “Most people don’t even realize they’re there.”

Environmental Impact

Recently, some who have long backed the wind and solar industries in the hopes of reducing global temperatures have also appeared to be growing concerned about the environmental impact of these technologies.

A May 2023 report in the Guardian newspaper stated that solar farms in California have turned a natural oasis into what one resident called “a dead solar sea”. Examining 150,000 acres of solar development in the Mojave Desert, the report looked at the “devastating impact” on local wildlife, the drying up of local wells from the solar panels’ massive consumption of water, and the harm to the health of nearby communities.

Environmentalists said this section of the Mojave Desert was home to vegetation such as 1,000-year-old woodlands that captured carbon from the atmosphere and sequestered it in root systems underground. Residents spoke of dust storms that cause respiratory problems, as local vegetation that had held soil in place was destroyed.

Mr. Rieber points to what he calls a “special convergence” among various interest groups across the political spectrum, from hunters and farmers to conservationists, who will feel the impact of solar development.

“They’re converging around this idea that we should be mindfully siting these developments in areas where we’re not going to be sacrificing the health of communities, we’re not going to be sacrificing important wildlife habitat, we’re not going to be substantially affecting species and source-water protection areas and things like that,” he said.

Public Comment Period

The BLM reports that it has, as of December 2022, permitted more than 9 GW of solar energy development, 3 GW of wind energy development, and 1.6 GW of geothermal energy development on public lands. The BLM has also permitted 17 transmission lines crossing BLM-administered lands to connect these facilities to the electric grid.

The public comment period for this latest initiative runs through April 18 and features a number of in-person and online hearings that are listed on the BLM website.

“You too can weigh in; you don’t need to be a policy analyst; you can be a regular citizen,” Ms. Hoffman said. “This is what these comment periods are for; you can just write a sentence, simple as that.”

Meanwhile, public officials believe there’s a way to allow solar development that will be acceptable to local communities.

“The question on the table isn’t whether solar is good or bad; I think everyone ascertains that there is a place for it,” Mr. Rieber said. “The question on the table, rather, is let us proceed with this development in a way that we won’t regret in the future.”

Mr. Hoyt said that if the BLM proceeds with the Western Solar Plan as currently written, lawsuits will likely be the result.

“We don’t want to see litigation around solar development,” he said. “We have great relationships in Utah with our BLM employees, and we want to keep it that way.”

This article originally appeared at Epoch Times

ESG On The Out?

On episode 100 of The Climate Realism Show, we look into the declining trends of the ESG. The Heartland Institute’s Jim Lakely, H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken, plus special guest, anti-ESG investment guru Don Harrison look at the madness behind ESG and why it is now failing to maintain momentum as investors back away.

Climate Change Roundtable is now The Climate Realism Show. The same great climate news and analysis from The Heartland Institute’s world-class climate and energy experts, but a snazzy new name that gets right to the heart of what it is about.

On episode 100 of The Climate Realism Show, we look into the declining trends of the ESG. The Heartland Institute’s Jim Lakely, H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken, plus special guest, anti-ESG investment guru Don Harrison look at the madness behind ESG and why it is now failing to maintain momentum as investors back away.

Plus, we will also have our regular weekly feature, Crazy Climate News – where we look at some of the most absurd climate alarmism stories of the week.

Four Ways Net Zero Ruins Us

This is a beginning post toward infographics exposing the damaging effects of Climate Policies upon the lives of ordinary people.  And all of the pain is for naught in fighting against global warming/climate change, as shown clearly in the image above. 

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

This is a beginning post toward infographics exposing the damaging effects of Climate Policies upon the lives of ordinary people.  And all of the pain is for naught in fighting against global warming/climate change, as shown clearly in the image above.  This post presents graphics to illustrate the first of four themes:

  • Zero Carbon Means Killing Real Jobs with Promises of Green Jobs
  • Reducing Carbon Emissions Means High Cost Energy Imports and Social Degradation
  • 100% Renewable Energy Means Sourcing Rare Metals Off-Planet
  • Leave it in the Ground Means Perpetual Poverty
Part 1:  Zero Carbon will Decimate US Workforce

Tables of Oil and Natural Gas Employment and Economic Impact come from API Price Waterhouse Cooper  Impacts of the Oil and Natural Gas Industry on the US Economy in 2019    As for Coal, EIA estimates the industry lost 75% of its workforce down to 53,000 employees (2019) working in coal mines, and the number has stabilized with exports offsetting declines in domestic consumption.  The losses of jobs in oil and gas come from EID (Energy in Depth) CLIMATE ACTIVISTS PUSH STUDY SHOWING 3.8 MILLION LOST JOBS FROM RENEWABLE ENERGY TRANSITION.

“While many experts dispute the feasibility of Jacobson’s plan for a renewables-only energy grid, the severe job losses are far more difficult to dispute, given that they come directly from Jacobson’s research. Those job losses would undoubtedly be devastating for millions of American families.”

And about Those Promised Green Jobs to replace the lost ones:  

In February 2009, the last time Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden flew to Colorado to sign their $787 billion stimulus package into law.

The plan was to invest $150 billion over 10 years that would advance a “clean energy” economy built around biofuels, hybrid cars, low-emission coal plants, and renewable sources such as solar and wind. Obama and Biden promised to create five million green jobs that would specifically benefit low-income earners, claiming that the stimulus package included “help for those hit hardest by our economic crisis.”

A decade later, we now know that the 2009 green jobs program was a complete failure. The Department of Labor (DoL) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) issued several reports on the green jobs program. Each report was an indictment on the program, as job placement met only 10 percent of the targeted level, and many of those who were hired remained employed for less than six months.

Even the new, redefined green jobs did not reach the five million promised in February 2009. According to a study by the Brookings Institution, the Obama–Biden administration identified nearly 2.7 million green jobs, but most were bus drivers, sewage workers, and other types of work that do not match the “green jobs of the future” that the administration promised. Most of them were preexisting jobs, which were simply re-characterized by the government, apparently in an effort to boost the numbers.  Source: If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try ‘Green Jobs’ Again

See also Green Energy Failures Redux

New York State Sea Level Rise:  Fantasy as Law

In the United States, both Federal and State agencies make pseudo-laws by formalizing “rules” which have the effect of law but are not written by or voted on by the legislators which have the responsibility to make law.

From Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Kip Hansen — 28 February 2024

In the United States, both Federal and State agencies make pseudo-laws by formalizing “rules” which have the effect of law but are not written by or voted on by the legislators which have the responsibility to make law.

We see this in the fight over CO2 and PM2.5 rules from U.S. Federal agencies like the EPA.  At the Federal level, the rule making process takes more than a year, usually two or more and includes Public Comment periods.  Rules are difficult to undo – and require the same lengthy process to make a new rule to override the old. 

New York State, currently big on the Climate Crisis, has just proposed a new rule as follows:

Proposed Action: Amendment of Part 490 of Title 6 NYCRR.

Statutory authority: Environmental Conservation Law, section 3-0319

Subject: Science-based State sea level rise projections. — Purpose: To establish a common source of sea-level rise projections for consideration in relevant programs and decision-making.

In plain English, the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC) proposes a common source of Sea Level Rise Projections to be used statewide for program planning and decisions making.  This sounds good, right?  Can’t have all these different government programs and politicians using different data – that would be a mess.

Let’s see what they are mandating through this rule:

490.1 Purpose: This Part establishes science-based projections of [sea-level rise] sea level rise for New York State’s tidal coast, including the marine coasts of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties and the five boroughs of New York City, and the main stem of the Hudson River, north from New York City to the federal dam at Troy.

Readers unfamiliar with New York State geography can look at this map of NY State – the above paragraph covers all the coastal sections of Long Island, Atlantic and Long Island Sound, and the Hudson River, which is tidal, all the way to Troy, which is north of Albany:

So, we see that besides the usual coastal areas, where we would expect tides, the Hudson River itself is tidal all the way north to “the federal dam at Troy”, which is 160 miles north of The Battery which sits at the southern tip of Manhattan Island (see inset lower right).   

The geography dictates that all of the tides up the Hudson River are determined by the tides at the Battery.

So, if we want to know how much sea level rise there has been in the past for Manhattan and all points north on the Hudson River, we must look to the tide gauge at The Battery.  We would be in luck, as that is one of the longest continuous tide gauge records in the United States and is coupled to a continuously operating GPS stations, which allows correction of the tide gauge record for the  vertical land movement (VLM) of the rock to which the tide gauge is attached.  Subtracting the VLM from the Relative Sea Level Rise (RSLR) apparent in the Tide Gauge Record,  we can determine eactly how much the sea surface itself has risen.

According to NOAA’s tide gauge record, The Battery has a long-term, nearly-perfectly linear record of Relative Sea Level Rise over 167 years of 2.92 mm/yr.  It can be highly variable month-to-month.  We can safely just say 3 mm per year and be close enough.

How much of that is subsidence of the structure on which the tide gauge is mounted?  According to the latest study [Wu, P.-C., Wei, M. (M. ), & D’Hondt, S. (2022). “Subsidence in coastal cities throughout the world observed by InSAR”. Geophysical Research Letters ] NY City’s The Battery sees VLM of -1.21 mm/yr.  That is subsidence, downward land movement, of over 40% of the recorded Relative Sea Level Rise, leaving  1.69 mm/yr of upward movement of the actual surface of the sea per year.  That 1.69 is very close to the standardly cited Global Sea Level Rise figure for the 20th Century of 1.7 or 1.8 mm/yr.  (opinions vary – see NOAA here.)

Note that this latest VLM finding is very close to that found in the seminal paper by Snay et al. in 2007 of -1.35 mm/yr for The Battery.

The subsidence at The Battery will not necessarily be reflected in the tidal values up the Hudson River, as coastal New York is thought to be subsiding at a faster rate than areas inland, and the “hinge point” for crustal rebound on the Hudson River is around Kingston, NY, which is about 95 miles north of The Battery, north of which the land begins to rise instead of subside.  

Nonetheless, for our purposes today, when talking about potential Sea Level Rise in the upriver reaches of the Hudson River, we can use 3 mm/yr as the upper bound and 1.7 mm/yr as the lower bound for Sea Level Rise on the tidal Hudson based on historical records corrected for VLM.

The proposed NY State rule calls for replacing the previously used  ClimAID projections, which had been updated in 2014, in this report:

which can be downloaded here.

Let‘s see what the updated projections are as of 2014.

The new rule calls for replacing the projections from the ClimAID 2004 report as updated in 2014.  This newer report updated the base period, changing the base period from 2000-2004  to the twenty years between 1995-2014, but gives no numerical metric – it doesn’t state what they were to use for the average sea level for that time period.    There are so many different methods of determining that base period metric that I will simply fallback on referring to the tide gauge record at The Battery. 

Using the long-term tide gauge record, we see an unchanging trend of 2.9 mm/yr.  The trend for the base period appears to be the same when looking at the whole record. (Technically, using the recorded monthly values, from Jan 1995 through Dec 2014, the linear trend is down…which is what happens when selecting just a small portion of a long-term record).  The previous sentence is an error – depending on and sensitive to the exact starting and ending dates for the base period (Jan or Dec 1995 and Jan or Dec 2014) the trend is either close to 2.9 mm/yr or decidedly flatter.

All of that adds up to this:  The least-wrong projection of future sea level rise for The Battery would be “more of the same” – about 3 mm/yr. – and, if one was overcome by a sudden attack of over-cautiousness, “maybe a little more.”

If we wish to include global warming/climate change in our forecast, then we must do so from one of the following IPCC dates for the start of Climate Change:   1890,  1950 (mid-20th century) or 1979 [IPCC AR6].  It is obvious from the NOAA Tide Gauge Record of The Battery that the sea level rise rate did not change at any of those dates but has rather remained stubbornly steady at the stated about 3 mm/yr or 30 mm per decade or 300 mm (about 12 inches) per century.

What does the new rule say planners in NY State must consider?  For all of these projections which are from the base period 1995-2014, the date of the report?

The previous version, supposed to be based on the updated NYSERDA report, had these:

The first chart above is from the NY State Register version of the new rule, however, despite claiming that the projections are from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) 2014, they are not the same.  The second chart is the equivalent chart from NYSERDA (2014).  Note that the dates are different and that even for the Low Projection, the new rule adds 10 extra inches (from 15 to 25) to projected SLR in NYC by 2100 without any explanation for the differences from the NYSERDA report.

It has taken a very deep dig to discover that the SLR projections in the new rule are derived from an Interim Version of a report that is to be cited as : Stevens, A., & Lamie, C., Eds. (2024). New York State Climate Impacts Assessment: Understanding and preparing for our changing climate.  (All the available .pdf files are watermarked INTERIM PUBLICATION.)

I’ll come back to how these projections came to be so exceptionally high.

If we just stick to SLR trends, so how much SLR do we need to experience at The Battery to see 6 inches of SLR between 2014 and 2039?  That’s 25 years to see 152 millimeters of SLR; just about exactly 6 mm/yr. 

Low Projection:   Even for the low projection, we would have had to seen twice the rate of SLR, every year since 2014 and every year up to 2039,  as we have actually experienced.  In the 9 years since 2014, we have only had 27-30 mm of SLR leaving 122 mm to be achieved in the next 15 years which would be a rate of a little over 8 mm/yr, nearly triple the current rate.  Likewise, for the 2100 low projection, a rate of about 8 mm/yr for the rest of the century would be required. 

High Projection:  The projection calls for 13 inches or 330 mm between the years 2014 and 2039 – which would require a rate of SLR of 13 mm/yr.  Since it is now 2024, we have only about 15 years left to see the remaining 300 mm (we have already seen 30) which requires 20 mm per year or 8/10th of an inch, each year, for the next 15 years.

They are just making this rule now, today, this week. 

I would think that those proposing this rule would realize that if they have not seen any increase in SLR rate in the last decade, 2014 to 2024, that it would require something truly extraordinary to see the rate of SLR double or triple over the next 15 years.  And these multiples are just for the Low Projection.

When considering the High Projections to 2100, we find that the projected rate of SLR used in the new rule are the same 20 mm/yr for the 85 years from 2014-2100.  But again, that would have required 20 mm/yr for the last decade as well, which we have not seen.

In short, something is seriously wrong with the projections of Sea Level Rise in this new rule.  They are not based on the 2014 NYSERDA report, but on the new, apparently not yet finalized, New York State Climate Impacts Assessment (2024).  I’ll give you a peek at the full projection from this report for The Battery (click on it for a single page .pdf download):

NYS-Climate-Impacts-Assessment-Projections-SLT-Rev-2023-The-BatteryHerunterladen

From the chart above, the Climate Assessment makes this claim:

“Projections for the future: Sea level is projected to rise along the state’s coastline and in the tidal Hudson by about 2 to 3 feet by the end of the century. However, there is a chance of a more dramatic change if part of the Antarctic ice sheet collapses, for example. Such a change is impossible to predict with any certainty, and scientists consider it a “low probability but high impact” event. If it happens, New York could experience sea level rise of about 7 to 10 feet by the end of the century.”

How in the world do they arrive at such hysterical conclusions?  Here’s the text from the new proposed rule:  “To provide for consideration of a range of possible futures, including potential for low-confidence, high-consequence sea level rise scenarios associated with rapid melt of land-based ice, the Department proposes adoption of projections based on a blending of projections associated with three illustrative scenarios: SSP2-4.5, SSP5-8.5 medium-confidence and SSP5-8.5 low-confidence.”

As with almost every other catastrophic climate change scenario and projection, the Climate Assessment team has used SSP5-8.5 – not just once,  but two versions of SSP5-8.5 “blended” with more sensible projections produced by SSP2-4.5. 

I’m sure that there is a procedure explaining somewhere how one scientifically “blends” projections, particularly if two of the three are considered improbable, implausible and/or outright impossible.   If you can find it, please let me know.

Normally, I would shake my head in amusement and forget it.  But in this case, everyone in New York with interests in tidal areas, including my friends and neighbors, or who pays State taxes of any sort, will be paying the price for these wildly exaggerated projections of sea level rise.

Bottom Lines:

1.  The report prepared for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its projections of Sea Level Rise in NY State were touted as “Science-based State sea level rise projections”.  However, the even the projections in the updated version are poor science and do not even take into account the actual SLR seen over the last two decades, during which the SLR rate has stubbornly remained at 3 mm/yr. 

2.  The  updated NYSERDA 2014 report did not use standard procedures for its sea level rise projections, but a homespun mixture  “using  an innovative component-by-component analysis (Table 2)  that blends climate model outputs and expert judgment for  variables like ice sheet dynamics that climate models are unable to simulate.”    

3.  Worse yet, the new proposed rule under consideration,  as contained in the NY State Register, does not use the projections from the NYSERDA 2014, but instead uses the interim projections, claimed to be based on the IPCC’s AR6, in the New York State Climate Assessment.

4.  All of the projections, in the new rule,  in the NYSERDA 2014 report and in the NYS Climate Assessment require doubling and tripling of long-term SLR rates as seen at The Battery.  Such increases have not been seen in the decade since the 2014 update report and, based on the historical record,  are extremely unlikely to be seen in the near future.

5.  RCP8.5, or the newer version called  SSP2-8.5. A reasonable approach to projecting SLR in NY State, using the IPCC’s SSP2-4.5, has been polluted by “blending” in two projection sets based on the implausible, maybe impossible,  SSP5-8.5 resulting in projections that appear as fantasies.

5.  There must have been a real stickler on the NYS Climate Assessment team to force them to include the following caveat at the bottom of their SLR projections:

“Like all projections, these climate projections have uncertainty embedded within them. Sources of uncertainty include data and modeling constraints, the random nature of some parts of the climate system, and limited understanding of some physical processes. Levels of uncertainty are characterized using state-of-the-art climate models, multiple scenarios of future greenhouse gas concentrations, and recent peer-reviewed literature. Even so, the projections are not true probabilities, so the specific numbers should not be emphasized, and the potential for error should be acknowledged.”

6. Laughably, the Register entry, makes the following claim:

“4. Costs   Part 490 will not impose any costs on any entity because the regulation consists only of sea level rise projections and does not impose any standards or compliance obligations.”   

The new rule, however, literally “raises the bar”, to ridiculous heights, required for compliance with an untold number of other existing rules and regulations that mandate actions based on what will be these new official projections of Sea Level Rise, if the rule is enacted.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

My usual Sea Level Caveats apply:  The surface of the sea is rising, it has been rising for several hundred years, slowly and inexorably. It will continue to do so until the Earth enters into yet another cool period.  Human developments on low-lying coastal land (and foolishly-built infrastructure on barrier islands) are already at risk and should undertake adaption and mitigation efforts.

The very hard-working and knowledgeable Roger Caiazza, the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York, brought this matter to my attention — and I hope that those of you with interests in New York State will take advantage of the Comment Period to object to this new rule.

You may participate in the Public Comment process as follows:

“Written comments on the proposed rule may be submitted until 5 p.m. on April 29, 2024. Comments and requests for further information can be sent by mail to Mark Lowery, NYS DEC Office of Climate Change, 625 Broadway, Albany, NY 12233-1030 or emailed to climate.regs@dec.ny.gov.  Include “Comments on Part 490” in the subject line of the email.”

Here is the link to read the full rule proposal in the NY State Register.   The Part 490 proposal begins on Page 8.

Thanks for reading.

Note: As usual, several obvious typos and grammatical errors have been corrected on my first reading after initial publication. There were quite a few — injected by nasty little internet pixies while I distracted. kh

The Des Moines Register Misses the Possible Benefits of Research Suggesting That Climate Change Will Cause Fewer Blizzards

An article in the Des Moines Register (DMR) titled Are you tired of yearly blizzards? Well, Iowa could see fewer blizzards in the years ahead, reports on a study from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln predicting that the Midwest, including Iowa, will likely see a declining number of blizzards due to climate change.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

An article in the Des Moines Register (DMR) titled Are you tired of yearly blizzards? Well, Iowa could see fewer blizzards in the years ahead, reports on a study from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln predicting that the Midwest, including Iowa, will likely see a declining number of blizzards due to climate change. While this result is uncertain, if true, the DMR should be reporting it as a benefit of climate change because blizzards cause millions of dollars in damage and hundreds of deaths every year.

The study used computer models projections to estimate a decline in blizzards, yet as Climate Realism has discussed numerous times in the past, the models themselves are unreliable, and thus of questionable utility for this purpose. Even the author Liang Chen admitted as much.

“[T]here is no study looking at how they [blizzards] will change in the future, based on climate simulations,” Chen told DMR. “The major reason is: It’s hard to quantify.”

Also the data that do exist provide no evidence for a declining trend in blizzards, despite modest warming. According to the study:

In this study, we analyzed historical blizzard occurrences using the observed storm event database, which shows that the Northern Plains, such as North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota, had the most blizzard activities over the past 25 years. No significant trend in blizzard occurrence is found in those regions.

The DMR ignores the fact that were the prediction of fewer blizzards and a decline in extreme cold storms to prove true, this would be a benefit, rather than something to be bemoaned. More than 400 people die during blizzards in the United States, alone, each year. Also, as Climate Realism has pointed out repeatedly, here, here, and here, for example, cold weather kills far more people each year than hot weather. As the climate has modestly warmed, the number of deaths attributed to non-optimum temperatures has fallen dramatically.

Regardless, trying to tease a future trend in blizzards out of climate computer models for a relatively small geographic region, much less for the particular state of Iowa,  is fraught with uncertainty, often no better than a coin flip. The world has been naturally and gently warming since the end of the little Ice Age in 1850. During that time no trend in blizzards was reported in the historical data. If a trend in blizzards for the Midwest did not emerge with over 150 years of warming, it is also unlikely to emerge in the future.

It seems that this is just another example of the media blindly reporting on climate science without fully understanding the uncertainties and full implications of the research they are writing about.

“He considers Joe Biden a type of rightwing climate realist.”

Why do some green left wing radicals feel so exhausted and fed up? Aside from the fact lots of people think they are nut jobs and ignore them, I personally believe what they are feeling is the mental stress of maintaining belief in a set of absurd fictions.

From The Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Imagine someone so left wing they think Joe Biden is a jingoistic capitalist.

‘Quite radical’: the feeling of exhaustion is key to tackling climate change, says author

Exhausted of the Earth author Ajay Singh Chaudhary says how we feel and the state of the earth are connected

Wed 28 Feb 2024 16.00 AEDTLast modified on Wed 28 Feb 2024 21.28 AEDT

Are you exhausted today?” political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks over video chat on a dark Friday afternoon. This is a question he is posing not just to me, but to you, too – and it’s one he already knows the answer to. Most of us, the indicators suggest, would suggest we are. But Chaudhary argues this isn’t just an individual problem: “Our ecological life is exhausting, our social and economic lives are exhausting, even our individual lives are exhausting.”

This is one of the central arguments of his first book The Exhausted of the Earth: how you feel and the state of the world are connected. And, he argues, it doesn’t have to be this way. “Your exhaustion is not some random byproduct […] There is a class of people out there who cause your exhaustion, [and] it’s not just Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.” Under capitalism, we are not all in it together.

Executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, an educational organisation for adult learners, Chaudhary’s book is an accessible analysis of how climate and politics interact. Writing it was “like a return to home”, he says; his parents are natural scientists and it was drilled into him from a young age that the climate crisis was not being approached politically.

…

He considers Joe Biden a type of rightwing climate realist. Among the US president’s most important climate policies is not just the Inflation Reduction Act but the US National Security Strategy, Chaudhary argues. “It is insanely jingoistic,” he says. It describes, for instance, out-competing China. If that’s the framework, he argues, we’re doomed, “because US-China cooperation is vital”. Ultimately, rightwing climate realists know there will be “instability” and “they are preparing for it”. That they will be successful is not only “plausible and possible, but probable,” he says.

…Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/28/quite-radical-the-feeling-of-exhaustion-is-key-to-tackling-climate-change-says-author-ajay-singh-chaudhary

Do you feel exhausted? I certainly don’t. I enjoy life, family, and the wonderful place I live, where I can make money doing something which doesn’t involve heavy lifting, thanks to the joys of our modern information age.

Why do some green left wing radicals feel so exhausted and fed up? Aside from the fact lots of people think they are nut jobs and ignore them, I personally believe what they are feeling is the mental stress of maintaining belief in a set of absurd fictions.

Imagine the effort of continuously forcing yourself to believe how doomed we all are during your every waking hour, reminding yourself every time you make a coffee or eat pre-packaged food, of how all the modern conveniences of life are accelerating us towards the imminent extinction of Mankind, and how if you catch a glimpse of children playing in the sunshine, that sunshine and warmth is a harbinger of the end times.

Maybe I’m wrong. I would be happy to read and review Ajay Singh Chaudhary’s book The Exhausted of Earth. But I’m not going to pay £14.99 for what essentially seems to be a political tract.

The EV market hits the brakes as sales hit a speed bump!

Again, the elites have bought them and will continue to buy them, BUT we’re running out of elites to buy EVs!

From CFACT

By Ronald Stein

Mandating a change to EV ownership and further financial austerity onto those who can least afford it is facing a rebellion from those who need transportation. The problem is that manufacturers are loading up the “supply chain” with EVs on dealer lots, but they’re not seeing the “demand” for EVs coming from the public.

The current EV ownership profiles are reflected in the oligarchic elite owners are that they are:

  • Highly educated.
  • Highly compensated.
  • Multi-car families.
  • Low mileage requirements for the families’ second car, i.e., the EV.
  • Reside in a “temperate” climate like CA. or FL. Almost 40% of EVs are in CA., and CA. has 6 times as many EVs as FL.

Unlike the profile of current EV owners, the owners of internal combustion engine vehicles are dramatically different from most potential EV vehicle owners.

  • Many are single-car owners.
  • Most of the potential car buyers are not as highly educated,
  • Nor as highly compensated as the elite EV owners.
  • Mandating a change to EV ownership and forced austerity may face a rebellion from those who need affordable vehicle transportation.

EV sales are beginning to hit a speed bump.

  • Hertz, previously an eager early adopter of fleet electrification, announced a big sell-off of EVs.
  • Ford’s electric vehicle business lost nearly $4.7 billion in 2023 and could lose another $5 billion in 2024; thus, Ford slashed EV production, having earlier pulled back on planned battery factories.
  • Unsold new EVs are piling up on dealer lots, spurring aggressive discounting.
  • “No one wants to buy used EVs,” as Fortune reports, leaving EV used-car values in free fall.

According to one industry executive, the situation “has the potential to destroy billions” of dollars in value for auto firms.

1 – By law, the credit in the Inflation Reduction Act is supposedly available only when purchasing vehicles built with materials sourced primarily in the U.S.

2 – However, nearly all battery materials are currently foreign-made and will remain so for ages.

3 – An Inflation Reduction Act exception allowing credit for leased vehicles built with foreign materials. Evidently, the pen is mightier than the miner.

4 – Thus, leasing has soared to over half of all EV sales in America, as leasing is the only way to capture the federal $7,500 tax credit for most EVs.

The American government provides incentives and tax deductions to transition society to EVs, but those incentives are financial incentives for the continuation of Child Labor and Ecological Destruction “Elsewhere.” Is it ethical and moral to provide financial support to developing countries that are mining for exotic minerals and metals to build EV batteries for Americans?

The putative EV revolution is stalling for three main reasons, and not because of “dead robots” or the other road bumps in recent news. What will happen is that:

  1. We’ll run out of money to subsidize the common folk.
  2. We’ll run out of copper and other foreign-sourced special metals.
  3. Car drivers will run out of patience in putting up with inconveniences.

International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global gasoline consumption in 2023 blew past the pre-lockdown 2019 peak, even with roughly 30 million EVs on the world’s roads, up from near zero a decade ago. The primary reason may be that EVs are mainly 2nd vehicles with low mileage vs the high mileage workhorse vehicles that are internal combustion engines.

The CO2 emissions arising from building an EV before it gets driven revolve around a simple fact: a typical EV battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. That half-ton battery is made from a wide range of minerals, including copper, nickel, aluminum, graphite, and lithium. Accessing those minerals requires digging up and processing some 250 tons of earth per vehicle, mostly in poorer developing countries with minimal labor laws and environmental regulations.

The battery pack is a complex electrochemical system made from hundreds or thousands of parts, including sensors, safety systems, cooling or heating systems, and a boatload of power electronics.

The underlying material requirements from developing countries are the single constraint that will cause the EV to stall out before other factors kick in. All the world’s mines, both currently operating and planned, can supply only a small fraction of the 700 percent to 4,000 percent increase in various minerals like copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other rare earth elements that are essential components in many of today’s rapidly growing electricity technologies that will be needed to meet the wildly ambitious EV goals.

The rate of EV adoption is currently braking before there’s a battery-dominated future because, again, we’ll run out of money, copper, etc., and political tolerance for enriching other nations — especially China, where 50 percent to 90 percent of the critical materials are now controlled and produced and will be for years yet to come, no matter how lawmakers rewrite the sourcing regulations.

Again, the elites have bought them and will continue to buy them, BUT we’re running out of elites to buy EVs!

Please share this information with your friends to further enhance conversations about Energy Literacy, as Breezes and Sunshine cannot manufacture anything. Electricity CANNOT exist without crude oil!

This article originally appeared at America Out Loud

ISO/RTO Gaming: “Ketchup Caddy” Gets Caught

Philip Mango and Ketchup Caddy got caught–barely. But how many subtle manipulations have gone or are going undetected in the regulatory complexity where large rulebooks substitute for the free market’s ‘simple rules for a complex world‘?

From The Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr

“[Philip] Mango told FERC staff he planned to ‘[d]o this for just a couple of years, make a bunch of money to put kids through school and do all those things, and no one’s hurt’ …. Ketchup Caddy [was] a corporate entity that Mango had created to sell an in-car ketchup holder he invented….” (Utility Drive, below)

Why do the worst often get on top where political entrepreneurship replaces market entrepreneurship? Why does regulation invite gaming where (at best) entrepreneurship is superfluous?Consider the 1970s oil trading boom, where price-controlled oil was bid up to market levels without any value-added. Robert Sutton, a former trunk salesman, became a regulatory millionaire on that one.Remember Enron’s gaming of the California hyper-regulated electricity market in 2000/2001? Three authors wrote in Business History Review:

Enron’s traders used their knowledge of the newly designed markets to artificially increase or decrease wholesale prices in their favor, which often involved submitting false supply-and-demand information, withholding available electricity, or scheduling energy they did not have. They also made use of flaws in the market’s new computerized scheduling system, for instance, deliberately overloading parts of the grid to then receive payments for relieving it.Additionally, the FERC found that Enron had entered into undisclosed partnerships with numerous market participants, which allowed it to control energy scheduling and physical infrastructure. Not only did these actions exacerbate the state’s high energy prices and supply issues, but they directly violated Enron’s market-based rate authority and also contravened numerous rules set out in the protocols designed to govern the new system

——————————-

Here is the latest as reported by Ethan Howland in Utility Drive “FERC Enforcement Office Seeks $27M from Ketchup Caddy for MISO Demand Response Fraud” (February 22, 2024).

Ketchup Caddy and its owner should pay about $27 million for manipulating the Midcontinent Independent System Operator’s demand response resource programs and offering uncontracted capacity into MISO’s capacity auctions, according to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission enforcement office staff.“Ketchup Caddy operated as a fraudulent enterprise with no legitimate market activity, registering and clearing demand resources without their knowledge or consent and collected capacity payments in turn, without making payments to the registered resources,” FERC enforcement office staff said in a report on its investigation released Wednesday as part of a “show cause” order.

Ethan Howland continued:

Philip Mango, Ketchup Caddy’s CEO and co-owner, admitted that he didn’t try to contract with, or contact, potential customers, and that the fake customers Ketchup Caddy registered with MISO would not have responded if dispatched, enforcement office staff said.Ketchup Caddy, Mango and Todd Meinershagen, a company co-founder, received about $1 million in capacity payments from three MISO capacity auctions starting with its 2019/20 auction, according to FERC staff. The company’s fraudulent offers reduced revenue to other market participants by $17.6 million, staff estimated….

How did he do it?

According to enforcement office staff, Meinershagen “scraped” an Ameren website to collect customer data. He used an automated tool to flood the website with millions of random account numbers until it found a valid customer account, and then downloaded the account data to a spreadsheet, FERC staff said. Ketchup Caddy used that information as the basis for its participation in MISO’s capacity auctions, according to staff.Ketchup Caddy cleared 211.1 MW of capacity to begin performing on June 1, 2019, according to FERC staff. In the following two auctions, it cleared 303.2 MW and 372.3 MW. MISO did not call a curtailment event during those planning years and required only mock tests to verify performance, so Ketchup Caddy’s false registrations and offers went undetected until staff’s investigation, according to the report. 

Curiouser and curiouser:

Mango told FERC staff he planned to “[d]o this for just a couple of years, make a bunch of money to put kids through school and do all those things, and no one’s hurt,” according to the report. “Upon further reflection, I realize the egregiousness and the error of my ways.”Ketchup Caddy — a corporate entity that Mango had created to sell an in-car ketchup holder he invented — is based in Frisco, Texas, according to its market participant agreement with MISO. The grid operator removed Ketchup Caddy from its capacity market in October 2021 after it learned about Ketchup Caddy’s fraudulent registrations, FERC staff said….

Philip Mango and Ketchup Caddy got caught–barely. But how many subtle manipulations have gone or are going undetected in the regulatory complexity where large rulebooks substitute for the free market’s ‘simple rules for a complex world‘?

New York Strives For “Climate Justice”

In 2019, New York enacted a Climate Act, imposing on the citizens various legal mandates for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and net zero targets, the most immediate of which is a mandate of 70% of electricity production from zero-carbon-emissions sources by 2030. The official title of the Act is actually the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

From The Manhattan Contrarian

By Francis Menton

In 2019, New York enacted a Climate Act, imposing on the citizens various legal mandates for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and net zero targets, the most immediate of which is a mandate of 70% of electricity production from zero-carbon-emissions sources by 2030. The official title of the Act is actually the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

I’ve written a lot about portions of the Act dealing with reducing carbon emissions. Those portions are completely delusional, but at least they ostensibly have something to do with protecting the world’s climate. And then there is this “Community Protection” piece. What is that about? Try reading some of the materials coming out of our climate bureaucracies and you will learn that a second and co-equal focus of the Act is supposedly helping or protecting what they call “justice communities” living near at least some of the power plants.

CO2 emissions do not disproportionately affect these nearby “justice communities.” So the activists have come up with a different hook to use to demand closure of fossil fuel power plants on behalf of “justice communities.” That hook is certain local pollutants, particularly nitrogen oxides and PM2.5, the latter referring to very fine “particulate matter” of diameter 2.5 micrometers or less. The claim is that emissions of these pollutants, particularly as emitted from the sub-category of power plants known as “peakers,” is destroying the health of the people in the “justice communities.”

This campaign to close the “peaker” power plants makes even less sense than the campaign to eliminate CO2 emissions from the world by building millions of wind turbines. I know that may seem hard to believe, because you would think that nothing could make less sense than trying to eliminate carbon emissions by building millions of wind turbines. But consider the remainder of this post, and see if you agree with me.

I understand that there is a serious scientific debate as to whether this PM2.5 stuff, in small doses such as might come from a power plant burning natural gas, has any adverse health consequences at all. However, you don’t need to get into that debate to understand why the campaign against the “peaker” plants makes no sense.

Let’s start with some of the over-the-top claims of the advocates. A collection of the main environmental and “community” groups advocating for the closure of the “peaker” plants has gotten together to form something called the “PEAK Coalition.” The constituent groups in question go by the names UPROSE, THE POINT CDC, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, and the Clean Energy Group. Last month they put out a big Report with the title “Accelerate Now! The Fossil Fuel End Game 2.0.” The term “accelerate” summarizes what they want — they want the closure of the “peaker” plants speeded up and indeed done immediately. Here’s the reason why, from their introduction:

Throughout New York City, in response to demand for electricity that cannot be met by other sources of energy generation, highly polluting “peaker” power plants fire up in the South Bronx, Sunset Park, and other communities of color, exposing people living in these communities to numerous health risks. These expensive and inefficient oil and gas peaker plants spew harmful emissions into neighborhoods already overburdened by pollution, exacerbating widespread health problems. Peakers are a prime example of how low-income communities and communities of color bear the brunt of a host of energy and industrial infrastrucTture that poses significant public health and environmental hazards.

And then, an emotional tale of how power plants are somehow targeted specifically at harming the justice communities:

[E]very child growing up in the South Bronx is acutely aware that the city does not care about them. The moment they step outdoors, it is clear that their neighborhoods are unimportant to the city. The infrastructure reflects historical scorn for their existence. . . . A member of the PEAK Coalition was made to witness their own father’s stroke as a result of the environmental conditions they are forced to live in. . . . We cannot accept any infrastructure that jeopardizes the health and happiness of residents.

But then you get to a map of where these “peaker” plants are located, and the majority are in middle class or even wealthy neighborhoods. Here is the PEAK Coalition map from page 12 of their Report:

The largest capacity peaker plants are in Astoria, Queens — a very middle class area. The second largest is in a remote area of Staten Island. The plant on West 59th Street in Manhattan is right next to some of the most expensive condos in the City — just built in the last few years. I’ve never read a word about their having trouble selling those condos because they are next to a peaker power plant.

Roger Caiazza has an excellent post on February 7 critiquing the advocacy for immediate closure of all the peaker plants. Roger points out that the state bureaucrats (NYSERDA and the Department of Environmental Conservation) put on a webinar on January 23, from which he was able to get a copy of the slides. One of the slides is titled “What Kind of Sources Create Air Pollution Burdens in New York?” Here is that slide:

You can see that this one is specifically about PM2.5, and doesn’t include nitrogen oxides as well; and they don’t appear to have a comparable slide for the nitrogen oxides. Still, the story for PM2.5 shows just how ridiculous it is to blame this kind of pollution mostly on peaker power plants. The slide shows from the state’s own data that only 4% of PM2.5 emissions come from the entire electricity generation sector, and only a tenth of that, 0.4% of the total, from the peaker plants. Of the remaining 96%, the large majority comes from burning wood, and the rest from a wide variety of sources, mostly in industry, agriculture and transportation. While they don’t have a comparable slide for nitrogen oxides, there is every reason to believe that the story would be similar, although probably less heavily weighted to wood.

Meanwhile, does anybody live in fear of the health effect of particulate or nitrogen oxide emissions from burning wood in a fireplace? The particulate emissions are what give the wood smoke its pleasant smell. My own neighborhood has a large number of older buildings with wood-burning fireplaces. On cold days in the winter, there is a faint pleasant smell from the fires. I’ve never heard of anybody complaining, and apartments with fireplaces carry premium prices. The PM2.5 and NOx emissions are surely a multiple of what can be found in the air of the South Bronx from the peaker power plants.

Caiazza rightly points out that the PEAK Coalition people pay no attention to the need for the peaker plants to step in at times of peak demand, particularly the coldest days in the winter and the hottest days in the summer, to keep the lights on and the heat and air conditioning running. Nobody in New York has anything close to a solution for this issue other than natural gas power plants. More wind turbines and/or grid battery storage are never going to work.

UPDATE, February 29:

I thought I should add a picture of the “peaker” power plant on West 59th Street, along with its high-end neighbors. This 2018 shot is from a website called Field Condition, showing the condo development called Waterline Square then under construction, with the power plant immediately to its south:

And there’s another high-end new building right on the other side of the plant. Looking today at a real estate website, I find two two-bedroom apartments available at Waterline Square, both about 1500 square feet, and both for more than $4 million. Oh, the injustice!

Climate Model Bias 1: What is a Model?

Conceptual models are generally tested, and hopefully validated, by creating a mathematical model. The output from the mathematical model is compared to observations and if the output matches the observations closely, the model is validated. It isn’t proven, but it is shown to be useful, and the conceptual model gains credibility.

From Watts Up With That?

By Andy May

There are three types of scientific models, as shown in figure 1. In this series of seven posts on climate model bias we are only concerned with two of them.

The first are mathematical models that utilize well established physical, and chemical processes and principles to model some part of our reality, especially the climate and the economy.

The second are conceptual models that utilize scientific hypotheses and assumptions to propose an idea of how something, such as the climate, works.

Conceptual models are generally tested, and hopefully validated, by creating a mathematical model. The output from the mathematical model is compared to observations and if the output matches the observations closely, the model is validated. It isn’t proven, but it is shown to be useful, and the conceptual model gains credibility.

Figure 1. The three types of scientific models.

Models are useful when used to decompose some complex natural system, such as Earth’s climate, or some portion of the system, into its underlying components and drivers. Models can be used to try and determine which of the system components and drivers are the most important under various model scenarios.

Besides being used to predict the future, or a possible future, good models should also tell us what should not happen in the future. If these events do not occur, it adds support to the hypothesis. These are the tasks that the climate models created by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP)[1] are designed to do. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[2] analyzes the CMIP model results, along with other peer-reviewed research, and attempts to explain modern global warming in their reports. The most recent IPCC report is called AR6.[3]

In the context of climate change, especially regarding the AR6 IPCC[4] report, the term “model,” is often used as an abbreviation for a general circulation climate model.[5] Modern computer general circulation models have been around since the 1960s, and now are huge computer programs that can run for days or longer on powerful computers. However, climate modeling has been around for more than a century, well before computers were invented. Later in this report I will briefly discuss a 19th century greenhouse gas climate model developed and published by Svante Arrhenius.

Besides modeling climate change, AR6 contains descriptions of socio-economic models that attempt to predict the impact of selected climate changes on society and the economy. In a sense, AR6, just like the previous assessment reports, is a presentation of the results of the latest iteration of their scientific models of future climate and their models of the impact of possible future climates on humanity.

Introduction

Modern atmospheric general circulation computerized climate models were first introduced in the 1960s by Syukuro Manabe and colleagues.[6] These models, and their descendants can be useful, even though they are clearly oversimplifications of nature, and they are wrong[7] in many respects like all models.[8] It is a shame, but climate model results are often conflated with observations by the media and the public, when they are anything but.

I began writing scientific models of rocks[9] and programming them for computers in the 1970s and like all modelers of that era I was heavily influenced by George Box, the famous University of Wisconsin statistician. Box teaches us that all models are developed iteratively.[10] First we make assumptions and build a conceptual model about how some natural, economic, or other system works and what influences it, then we model some part of it, or the whole system. The model results are then compared to observations. There will typically be a difference between the model results and the observations, these differences are assumed to be due to model error since we necessarily assume our observations have no error, at least initially. We examine the errors, adjust the model parameters or the model assumptions, or both, and run it again, and again examine the errors. This “learning” process is the main benefit of models. Box tells us that good scientists must have the flexibility and courage to seek out, recognize, and exploit such errors, especially any errors in the conceptual model assumptions. Modeling nature is how we learn how nature works.

Box next advises us that “we should not fall in love with our models,” and “since all models are wrong the scientists cannot obtain a ‘correct’ one by excessive elaboration.” I used to explain this principle to other modelers more crudely by pointing out that if you polish a turd, it is still a turd. One must recognize when a model has gone as far as it can go. At some point it is done, more data, more elaborate programming, more complicated assumptions cannot save it. The benefit of the model is what you learned building it, not the model itself. When the inevitable endpoint is reached, you must trash the model and start over by building a new conceptual model. A new model will have a new set of assumptions based on the “learnings” from the old model, and other new data and observations gathered in the meantime.

Each IPCC report, since the first one was published in 1990,[11] is a single iteration of the same overall conceptual model. In this case, the “conceptual model” is the idea or hypothesis that humans control the climate (or perhaps just the rate of global warming) with our greenhouse gas emissions.[12] Various and more detailed computerized models are built to attempt to measure the impact of human emissions on Earth’s climate.

Another key assumption in the IPCC model is that climate change is dangerous, and, as a result, we must mitigate (reduce) fossil fuel use to reduce or prevent damage to society from climate change. Finally, they assume a key metric of this global climate change or warming is the climate sensitivity to human-caused increases in CO2. This sensitivity can be computed with models or using measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 and global average surface temperature. The IPCC equates changes in global average surface temperature to “climate change.”

This climate sensitivity metric is often called “ECS,” which stands for equilibrium climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2, often abbreviated as “2xCO2.”[13] Modern climate models, ever since those used for the famous Charney report in 1979,[14] except for AR6, have generated a range of ECS values from 1.5 to 4.5°C per 2xCO2. AR6 uses a rather unique and complex subjective model that results in a range of 2.5 to 4°C/2xCO2. More about this later in the report.

George Box warns modelers that:

“Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.”[15]Box, 1976

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC has published six major reports and numerous minor reports since 1990.[16] Here we will argue that they have spent more than thirty years polishing the turd to little effect. They have come up with more and more elaborate processes to try and save their hypothesis that human-generated greenhouse gases have caused recent climate changes and that the Sun and internal variations within Earth’s climate system have had little to no effect. As we will show, new climate science discoveries, since 1990, are not explained by the IPCC models, do not show up in the model output, and newly discovered climate processes, especially important ocean oscillations, are not incorporated into them.

Just one example. Eade, et al. report that the modern general circulation climate models used for the AR5 and AR6 reports[17] do not reproduce the important North Atlantic Ocean Oscillation (“NAO”). The NAO-like signal that the models produce in their simulation runs[18] is indistinguishable from random white noise. Eade, et al. report:

“This suggests that current climate models do not fully represent important aspects of the mechanism for low frequency variability of the NAO.”[19]Eade, et al., 2022

All the models in AR6, both climate and socio-economic, have important model/observation mismatches. As time has gone on, the modelers and authors have continued to ignore new developments in climate science and climate change economics, as their “overelaboration and overparameterization” has become more extreme. As they make their models more elaborate, they progressively ignore more new data and discoveries to decrease their apparent “uncertainty” and increase their reported “confidence” that humans drive climate change. It is a false confidence that is due to the confirmation and reporting bias in both the models and the reports.

As I reviewed all six of the major IPCC reports, I became convinced that AR6 is the most biased of all of them.[20] In a major new book twelve colleagues and I, working under the Clintel[21] umbrella, examined AR6 and detailed considerable evidence of bias.

From the Epilog[22] of the Clintel book:

“AR6 states that “there has been negligible long-term influence from solar activity and volcanoes,”[23] and acknowledges no other natural influence on multidecadal climate change despite … recent discoveries, a true case of tunnel vision.”

“We were promised IPCC reports that would objectively report on the peer-reviewed scientific literature, yet we find numerous examples where important research was ignored. In Ross McKitrick’s chapter[24] on the “hot spot,” he lists many important papers that are not even mentioned in AR6. Marcel [Crok] gives examples where unreasonable emissions scenarios are used to frighten the public in his chapter on scenarios,[25] and examples of hiding good news in his chapter on extreme weather events.[26] Numerous other examples are documented in other chapters. These deliberate omissions and distortions of the truth do not speak well for the IPCC, reform of the institution is desperately needed.”Crok and May, 2023

Confirmation[27] and reporting bias[28] are very common in AR6. We also find examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect,[29] in-group bias,[30] and anchoring bias.[31]

In 2010, the InterAcademy Council of the United Nations reviewed the processes and procedures of the IPCC and found many problems.[32] In particular, they criticized the subjective way that uncertainty is handled. They also criticized the obvious confirmation bias in the IPCC reports.[33] They pointed out that the Lead Authors too often leave out dissenting views or references to papers they disagree with. The Council recommended that alternative views should be mentioned and cited in the report. Even though these criticisms were voiced in 2010, I and my colleagues, found numerous examples of these problems in AR6, published eleven years later in 2021 and 2022.[34]

Although bias pervades AR6, this series will focus mainly on bias in the AR6 volume 1 (WGI) CMIP6[35] climate models that are used to predict future climate. However, we will also look at the models used to identify and quantify climate change impacts in volume 2 (WGII), and to compute the cost/benefit analysis of their recommended mitigation (fossil fuel reduction) measures in volume 3 (WGIII). As a former petrophysical modeler, I am aware how bias can sneak into a computer model, sometimes the modeler is aware he is introducing bias into the results, sometimes he is not. Bias exists in all models, since they are all built from assumptions and ideas (the “conceptual model”), but a good modeler will do his best to minimize it.

In the next six posts I will take you through some of the evidence of bias I found in the CMIP6 models and the AR6 report. A 30,000-foot look at the history of human-caused climate change modeling is given in part 2. Evidence that the IPCC has ignored possible solar influence on climate is presented in part 3. The IPCC ignores evidence that changes in convection and atmospheric circulation patterns in the oceans and atmosphere affect climate change on multidecadal times scales and this is examined in part 4.

Contrary to the common narrative, there is considerable evidence that storminess (extreme weather) was higher in the Little Ice Age, aka the “pre-industrial” (part 5). Next, we move on to examine bias in the IPCC AR6 WGII report[36] on the impact, adaptation, and vulnerability to climate change in part 6 and in their report[37] on how to mitigate climate change in part 7.

Download the bibliography here.


  1. https://wcrp-cmip.org/ ↑

  2. https://www.ipcc.ch/ ↑

  3. (IPCC, 2021) ↑

  4. IPCC is an abbreviation for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. agency. AR6 is their sixth major report on climate change, “Assessment Report 6.” ↑

  5. There are several names for climate models, including atmosphere-ocean general circulation model (AOGCM, used in AR5), or Earth system model (ESM, used in AR6). Besides these complicated computer climate models there are other models used in AR6, some model energy flows, the impact of climate change on society or the global economy, or the impact of various greenhouse gas mitigation efforts. We only discuss some of these models in this report. (IPCC, 2021, p. 2223) ↑

  6. (Manabe & Bryan, Climate Calculations with a Combined Ocean-Atmosphere Model, 1969), (Manabe & Wetherald, The Effects of Doubling the CO2 Concentration on the Climate of a General Circulation Model, 1975) ↑

  7. (McKitrick & Christy, A Test of the Tropical 200- to 300-hPa Warming Rate in Climate Models, Earth and Space Science, 2018) and (McKitrick & Christy, 2020) ↑

  8. (Box, 1976) ↑

  9. Called petrophysical models. ↑

  10. (Box, 1976) ↑

  11. (IPCC, 1990) ↑

  12. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.” (UNFCCC, 2020). ↑

  13. Usually, ECS means equilibrium climate sensitivity, or the ultimate change in surface temperature due to a doubling of CO2. but in AR6 sometimes they refer to “Effective Climate Sensitivity,” or the “effective ECS” which is defined as the warming after a specified number of years (IPCC, 2021, pp. 931-933). AR6, WGI, page 933 has a more complete definition. ↑

  14. (Charney, et al., 1979) ↑

  15. (Box, 1976) ↑

  16. See https://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ ↑

  17. CMIP5 and CMIP6 are the models used in AR5 and AR6 IPCC reports, respectively. ↑

  18. (Eade, Stephenson, & Scaife, 2022) ↑

  19. (Eade, Stephenson, & Scaife, 2022) ↑

  20. (May, Is AR6 the worst and most biased IPCC Report?, 2023c; May, The IPCC AR6 Report Erases the Holocene, 2023d) ↑

  21. https://clintel.org/ ↑

  22. (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 170-172) ↑

  23. AR6, page 67. ↑

  24. (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 108-113) ↑

  25. (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 118-126) ↑

  26. (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 140-149) ↑

  27. Confirmation bias: The tendency to look only for data that supports a previously held belief. It also means all new data is interpreted in a way that supports a prior belief. Wikipedia has a fairly good article on common cognitive biases. ↑

  28. Reporting bias: In this context it means only reporting or publishing results that favor a previously held belief and censoring or ignoring results that show the belief is questionable. ↑

  29. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the tendency to overestimate one’s abilities in a particular subject. In this context we see climate modelers, who call themselves “climate scientists,” overestimate their knowledge of paleoclimatology, atmospheric sciences, and atomic physics. ↑

  30. In-group bias causes lead authors and editors to choose their authors and research papers from their associates and friends who share their beliefs. ↑

  31. Anchoring bias occurs when an early result or calculation, for example Svante Arrhenius’ ECS (climate sensitivity to CO2) of 4°C, discussed below, gets fixed in a researcher’s mind and then he “adjusts” his thinking and data interpretation to always come close to that value, while ignoring contrary data. ↑

  32. (InterAcademy Council, 2010) ↑

  33. (InterAcademy Council, 2010, pp. 17-18) ↑

  34. (Crok & May, 2023) ↑

  35. https://wcrp-cmip.org/cmip-phase-6-cmip6/ ↑

  36. (IPCC, 2022) ↑

  37. (IPCC, 2022b) ↑