Day: March 6, 2024

The Continuing Albedo Change Warms the Earth More Than Twice as Much as CO2

The Earth’s reflectivity is measured by albedo (a latin word meaning ‘whiteness’). Albedo measures the proportion of solar irradiation that is reflected back to space, either by the ground or in the atmosphere.

From Watts Up With That?

Gabriel Oxenstierna

All life on Earth (somehow) originates from the Sun’s heat.
But how much of the solar irradiation reaches us Earthlings?
The question is highly relevant, as the amount of reflected sunlight displays a remarkable decreasing trend over time. As will be shown, this trend alone explains most of the warming we’ve had in recent decades.

The Earth’s reflectivity is measured by albedo (a latin word meaning ‘whiteness’). Albedo measures the proportion of solar irradiation that is reflected back to space, either by the ground or in the atmosphere. If albedo is 100 percent, all light is reflected, and 0 percent means no light is reflected. Albedo is very different for different materials: pure snow can be as high as >90%, dirty snow can be as low as 20%. Water has albedo <10% (depending on the angle of reflection, see figure 1).[1] Clouds vary greatly and are between 30% and 80% depending on the type of cloud. The Earth’s albedo averages 28%.

Figure 1. What reflects more sunlight, clouds, snow, ice, or water?

If we start from the top, we have a pretty much constant solar irradiance. As soon as the radiation enters the atmosphere, photons begin to be reflected by ozone in the stratosphere, by clouds, water vapor and aerosol microparticles. Of the remaining solar irradiation that reaches the Earth’s surface, an additional part will be reflected away. The amount that is reflected varies greatly and depends on numerous factors such as the geographical location, ground conditions (land/sea/rural/urban), which season we’re in, temperature, altitude, and not least the weather at the location.

On a global scale, all that local randomness evens out, and we have a stable irradiation on a monthly basis. Figure 2 shows how much net solar irradiation that flows in, as a global average, per square meter: it is solar irradiation at the top of the atmosphere, about 340 W/m2, minus reflected shortwave irradiation of about 98 W/m2. Net approximately 242 W/m2.

Figure 2. Net solar irradiation that reaches Earth, watts/m2, calculated as incoming solar radiation minus reflected shortwave radiation. Seasonally adjusted monthly averages for each of the hemispheres. Thick lines are Loess smooths, March 2000 – September 2023. Data: Ceres Ebaf4.

There is a significant positive trend during the period 2000–2023. The increasing amount of solar irradiation reaching Earth is due to a trendwise decrease in reflected shortwave irradiation by 1.5 W/m2. On the other hand, solar irradiation decreased by approximately 0.2 W/m2 during the same period due to the solar cycle becoming less active.

We have thus had an increase in net solar radiation over the period of approximately 1.3 W/m2 according to the Ceres data. The long-term positive trend in shortwave radiation has been confirmed to exist since 1983 (with other satellite data).[2] That there is an established trend for 40 years makes it climatologically significant.

Figure 3. The trend of increase in shortwave radiation from 1983-2001. Copy of figure 1 in [2].

Albedo change explains the increase in net solar irradiation

Albedo is highly variable in time and space. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of stability on a global scale. In Figure 4, the development is shown separately for the Northern Hemisphere (NH) and the Southern Hemisphere (SH). They are very close to each other; the difference is stable and mostly less than 0.5 percentage points. SH has the slightly lower level, which is explained by the fact that it is dominated by sea (with ~80 percent of the surface area, compared to the NH’s ~60 percent). If we’re looking only at the nature of the Earth’s surface, the difference would be significantly higher due to the land/sea ratio – but the reflection from the clouds acts to even out the hemispherical differences.

Figure 4. Albedo for the period March 2000 – September 2023, calculated as reflected shortwave radiation measured at the TOA relative to incoming solar radiation. Seasonally adjusted monthly averages. Thick lines are Loess smooths. Data: Ceres Ebaf.

We have a continuing, and significant negative trend. This means that more solar irradiation enters and warms the Earth. That the albedo trend is negative is well established, and has been demonstrated with different methods: Ceres satellite data, and also by measuring the Earth’s back-radiation towards the Moon.[3][4][5]

What causes the albedo decrease? Several factors contribute: a decreasing cloud cover (both its extent and optical depth) has been shown to be the primary factor [3][4]; increasing vegetation (‘global greening’) is also a well-established secular trend of significant importance. Decreasing amounts of aerosols are of less importance. This can be imputed from the stable difference between NH and SH in figure 4, as aerosols have a local, short-term effect that mainly affects the NH.[6]

The climate is very sensitive to a reduced albedo. Scientists at NASA claim that a reduction in albedo of 1 percentage point produces a warming effect equal to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.[7] Accordingly, the albedo decrease we have had in the last 24 years corresponds to almost 2.0 W/m². The increase in CO2 corresponds to only 0.7 W/m². See calculations below.

Conclusion: The ongoing, longterm reduction in albedo has produced more than twice as much warming effect in recent decades as the radiative forcing from CO2.

Calculations

1. Forcing from CO2

The IPCC states 3.9 W/m2 increased forcing from a doubling of CO2.[8] Mathematically, we search a factor that gives 3.9 from a doubling, expressed as a logarithm, ln(2/1). That factor is 5.63:

3.9 = x * ln(2/1)  è x = 5.63

We can now insert start and end values for CO2 instead of the numbers ‘2’ and ‘1’. In March 2000 we had about 370 ppm and in September 2023 about 420 ppm. The theoretical forcing from CO2 for the period would then be:

5.63 *ln(420/370) = 0.71 W/m²

2. Forcing from albedo decrease

a. Using the data. Estimating the global albedo decrease from March 2000 to September 2023 with OLS yields a negative slope of -0.0019 percentage points (pp) per month, and the total decline for the period is 0.54 pp.

Assuming a linear relationship during the period, a reduced albedo of 0.54 pp gives an increased solar irradiation of:
0.0054 * 340 W/m2 = 1.84 W/m2

b. Using the NASA rule of thumb. Alternatively, calculated according to the NASA researchers’ claimed relationship of the warming effect of a 1 percent albedo reduction mentioned above, and using IPCC:s value for forcing from CO2 of 3.9 W/m2, the theoretical forcing of the global albedo reduction for the 24 years is: [7]

3.9 * 0.0054/0.01 = 2.1 W/m²

In both variants a. and b., the resulting figure is more than 2.5 as large as the forcing from CO2. The calculations have not taken into account the slightly decreasing solar radiation over time, but this affects the result only marginally.

References

[1] The albedo of water is calculated according to the Fresnel relationships, see e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo#Water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_equations

[2] Do Satellites Detect Trends in Surface Solar Radiation?, Pinker and 2 co-authors, Science 2005, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1103159 .

[3] The albedo of Earth, Stephens and 5 co-authors, 2015, https://doi:10.1002/2014RG000449

[4] The changing nature of Earth’s reflected sunlight, Stephens and 8 co-authors, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2022.0053

[5] Earth’s Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured from Earthshine, Goode and 5 co-authors, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094888

[6] Divergent global-scale temperature effects from identical aerosols emitted in different regions, Persad and Caldeira, Nature 2018, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05838-6

[7] Changes in Earth’s Albedo Measured by Satellite, Wielicki and 5 co-authors, Science 2005, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1106484

[8] IPCC 2021, AR6 WG1, chapter 7, p. 925

Technical note

In order to create the diagrams, I first downloaded data from Ceres (NetCDF4 format). The data were then preprocessed in the program CDO (Climate Data Operators) in Linux (in my case Ubuntu under Windows). All the time series data were calculated as surface-weighted monthly values in CDO. After that, the resulting data files were read into R/Rstudio where the figures were created with GGplot. All data and software are free to use/open source.

Gabriel Oxenstierna is a PhD at Stockholm University and one of the Clintel signatories.

CFACT blasts offshore wind multiple-site assessment as ridiculous

CFACT has long called for an environmental assessment of the combined impact of the clusters of huge offshore wind facilities being pushed by the Feds. Each facility is being separately assessed even when they share a boundary.

From CFACT

By David Wojick

CFACT has long called for an environmental assessment of the combined impact of the clusters of huge offshore wind facilities being pushed by the Feds. Each facility is being separately assessed even when they share a boundary.

In many cases, it is clear that the adverse impacts will overlap and compound the harm to marine life. An obvious example is the incredibly loud and potentially harmful noise of pile driving. This noise carries over fifty miles, so if two sites are pile driving within a few miles of each other, the noise has to be much worse when the impacts combine.

The Federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is supposed to do environmental assessment of offshore wind (even though their mandate is to get it built). They finally produced a combined assessment for six facilities off of New York and New Jersey. It is grandly called a Programmatic Environmental Impact Assessment (PEIS) of the New York Bight.

CFACT’s official comments on this assessment are pretty clear: it is junk. Here are some telling excerpts:

“Most of the 800 or so pages are nothing more than an academic discussion of the general environment, the sorts of impacts that might or might not occur, and what might or might not be done about them. There is basically nothing about this specific combination of projects.”

“In short, the academic acoustic case considered in the PEIS tells us absolutely nothing about the potentially huge noise impact of the six projects supposedly being assessed. There is literally no environmental impact assessment here. This vacuum seems to hold for pretty much the entire PEIS, with no real assessment of the six projects. There is certainly nothing of substance on noise.”

“As environmental impact statements go, this one is ridiculous.”

A number of important adverse impacts are not even considered, especially the lifetime operational impacts that go on for decades.

First, there is the combined operational noise of these six big facilities, some of which are actually contiguous. In addition to the endless turbine noise, there is the noise from the fleet of boats servicing these turbines.

Then there is the massive plume of reduced energy air created by the energy-sucking turbines. There is a large scientific literature on the potentially damaging effects of this plume on ocean life, especially reduced productivity in the food chain.

There is also the threat of a deleterious plume of suspended sediments created by air and water turbulence at each turbine tower. This smothering plume also reduces productivity.

I discuss these so-called wake effects in this article.

So the PEIS only looks at construction and basically tells us nothing about the adverse impacts of that. Ridiculous is right.

Note that NOAA shares the blame for this travesty of assessment. They are the experts on the adverse impact of noise on the marine life that they are supposed to protect. For example, the combined adverse effects of all these wind facilities the Feds are rushing into being could exterminate the North Atlantic Right Whale and other endangered critters.

Make no mistake, there is here a clear violation of the National Environmental Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and no doubt other laws. Something must be done.

CFACT-Comments-on-6-site-NY-Bight-PEIS-zHerunterladen

How to Falsify Weather Station Data

Any time the government gives away money, there are some people out there who figure out a scam to get some of that money illegally.

From Watts Up With That?

News Brief by Kip Hansen — 5 March 2024

This is a true story. 

Two guys in Colorado took advantage of certain type of crop insurance, as explained by U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan:  ”One way the United States Department of Agriculture supports farmers and ranchers is by providing federal funding for crop insurance programs that pay indemnities when there is less than the usual amount of precipitation.” [ source ]

BBS news reports:

“The scheme was designed to benefit Jagers [and a fellow named Esch] through his crop insurance, the Rainfall Index Annual Forage Insurance Plan, which is one of several agriculture subsidies administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Federal Crop Insurance Program. 

Federal crop insurance is typically sold through private insurance companies who are subsequently reimbursed by the federal government. The Rainfall Index plan covers annual crops and “is focused on the amount of precipitation, not on actual crop production,” as described by prosecutors in a case document. “This means that a farmer can receive a payment when precipitation is below the historical normal level even if the relevant farmland suffers no loss in productivity.”

In Colorado, this deals with “forage” — as in Annual Forage Insurance Program : “Historically, the term forage has meant only plants eaten by the animals directly as pasture, crop residue, or immature cereal crops, but it is also used more loosely to include similar plants cut for fodder and carried to the animals, especially as hay or silage.” [ wiki ]

Paying indemnities means the US government pays farmers if it doesn’t rain enough – rainfall below average – based on the local rain gauges at Automated Surface Observing System stations regardless of actual crop yields.  For these ranchers, if there is less rain, there will be less forage for their cattle, which means less growth, which means less weight when sold, which means less profit.  At least that’s the idea.

It is as hard to make it rain less as it is to make it rain more.

But it was apparently easy to make it look like it rained less.  Just jigger the rain gauges at the local ASOS.

“The group allegedly damaged rain gauges located in Springfield, Ordway, La Junta, Walsh, and Ellicott, Colorado, and others in Syracuse, Coolidge, and Elkhart, Kansas. Wires were cut, funnels to rain collectors were filled with silicone, holes drilled or punched in collectors, parts of collectors were disassembled, and objects such as cake pans or pie tins were placed over the gauges during rainstorms.” [ CBSNews ]

The US Attorney’s Office gives this version:

“The conspirators used various means and methods to tamper with the rain gauges. Mr. Esch covered gauges in southeastern Colorado with agricultural equipment and used other means as well, such as filling gauges with silicone to prevent them from collecting moisture, cutting wires on the gauges, or detaching and then tipping over the bucket that collected precipitation. Mr. Jagers typically used an agricultural disc blade to cover up a rain gauge in Lamar, Colorado. This tampering created false records making it appear that less rain had fallen than was the case.” [ source ]

To you and I, this might seem like a lot of work for a bit of crop insurance money – not so, the two were sentenced to sentenced to “pay a combined $3.1 million in restitution”.

Bottom Line:

Those are some real climate crooks.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

Any time the government gives away money, there are some people out there who figure out a scam to get some of that money illegally.

“An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding.” [ source ]

And yes, that means that the climate data, at least for precipitation in those areas, is not reliable for that specific time period. 

Thanks for reading.

Leftwing Extremist Group Claims Sabotaging Power Grid, Paralyzing Berlin Tesla Plant!

A power outage struck Tesla’s Gigafactory in Grünheide, Germany, causing a halt in production early this morning. The cause of the outage remains under investigation, but reports suggest a fire was deliberately set and damaged an electricity pylon near the factory, leading to power cuts in the surrounding area, including Grünheide.

From NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin 

Act of eco-terrorism strikes Germany!

Extreme left-wing group sends industry a message: “You’re not welcome any more!”

Extreme leftist “Vulkan Group” claims responsibility for Tesla Gigafactory plant power supply sabotage. Image: Cropped from Tesla site. 

A power outage struck Tesla’s Gigafactory in Grünheide, Germany, causing a halt in production early this morning. The cause of the outage remains under investigation, but reports suggest a fire was deliberately set and damaged an electricity pylon near the factory, leading to power cuts in the surrounding area, including Grünheide.

The impact of the outage on Tesla production schedules and delivery timelines is yet to be determined. Tesla is expected to provide further updates as the situation unfolds.

The left-wing extremist classified ,”Vulkan Group”, has reportedly claimed responsibility for the “attack on the power supply” in a letter that paralyzed the Tesla plant.

“This was specifically directed against the car manufacturer.,”  according to euronews.com here. “The authenticity of the letter is still being investigated by the police. ‘We sabotaged Tesla today,’ the group allegedly states in the letter.”

There have been repeated protests against planned plant expansion. Activists from the “Stop Tesla” initiative are currently demonstrating against the US company’s expansion plans on the Grünheide site.

“For more than a week, around 100 environmental activists from the initiative have been occupying a forest near the Tesla factory. Around 100 hectares of forest are to be cleared there to make room for warehouses, a freight depot and a company kindergarten,” reports euronews.com.

Eco-terrorism against sustainable future

Tesla began construction of the Gigafactory in Grünheide, near Berlin in May 2020, and opened in March, 2022. The facility manufactures batteries and electric vehicles, the first plant of its kind in Europe for Tesla.

The plant’s opening was a significant step in promoting sustainable transportation. The opening ceremony was attended by several dignitaries, including Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany and Robert Habeck, German Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action.

Earlier, Chancellor Angela Merkel and other government officials welcomed Tesla’s decision to build the factory and viewed it as a positive development for Germany’s green future and as a step to accelerate the transition to sustainable transportation.

But now it is increasingly becoming apparent that radical leftwing groups don’t even want sustainable energy.

Check Your Facts, CNN, Human Emissions Aren’t Driving ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Decline

A CNN story implies that supposed human caused climate change is causing the Thwaites Glacier to melt, causing sea level rise. This is false. Data show that Antarctica has not been warming. Also, the study CNN cited, itself shows the glacier has declined dramatically and recovered repeatedly in the past, all without human contribution, suggesting the present decline is part of a natural cycle.

From ClimateRealism


By H. Sterling Burnett

NASA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A CNN story implies that supposed human caused climate change is causing the Thwaites Glacier to melt, causing sea level rise. This is false. Data show that Antarctica has not been warming. Also, the study CNN cited, itself shows the glacier has declined dramatically and recovered repeatedly in the past, all without human contribution, suggesting the present decline is part of a natural cycle.

At approximately the size of Florida, the Thwaites glacier is the broadest glacier on Earth. The Thwaites glacier is often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier,” based on the belief that a complete collapse would cause as much as two feet of sea level rise over time. The CNN story, “The ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is rapidly melting. Scientists now have evidence for when it started and why,” discusses a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which determined when the present decline began.

“By analyzing marine sediment cores extracted from beneath the ocean floor, researchers found the glacier began to significantly retreat in the 1940s, likely kicked off by a very strong El Niño event — a natural climate fluctuation which tends to have a warming impact,” reports CNN. “Since then, the glacier has been unable to recover, which may reflect the increasing impact of human-caused global warming, according to the report.”

Although the timing of commencement of Thwaites decline may now have been determined, any prognostications about future trends for the glacier are pure speculation, unsupported by historical evidence or data about present Antarctic trends.

The underlying reports determined that the Thwaites glacier’s decline commenced in the 1940s probably prompted by a powerful El Nino event which warmed the abutting waters. Even CNN  allows that El Niño’s are “a natural climate fluctuation which tends to have a warming impact.” Indeed, recent years when global average temperatures have spiked have almost all coincided with El Nino events.

To be clear, from the 1940s through the 1970s global average temperatures were cooling, and CO2 concentrations were significantly lower, although beginning to increase. What’s true for the globe as a whole, however, is not true for West Antarctica, where the Thwaites Glacier is located. Research from 2023 shows that temperatures there have fallen nearly two degrees Celsius over the past two decades, at least. Other research discussed at Climate Realism suggests that whatever impact the Twaits Glacier’s decline is having on sea level rise is being mitigated by an increase in snow and ice elsewhere on the continent.

Further evidence suggesting that anthropogenic climate change has nothing to do with the Thwaites Glacier’s recent melting trend is found in the study as well. Indeed, the study determined that the Thwaites Glacier has retreated and expanded multiple times over the millennia. As CNN writes, the researchers involved found that “similar retreats have happened much further back in the past, the ice sheet recovered and regrew . . . [with] James Smith, a marine geologist at the British Antarctic Survey and a study co-author, [telling CNN] ‘Once an ice sheet retreat is set in motion it can continue for decades, even if what started it gets no worse.’”

The researchers and CNN bemoan the fact that the Thwaites glacier’s decline is not reversing, but they themselves admit that such declines in gone on for decades in the ancient past, with no help from humans. And, the precipitating event, a strong El Nino, has been repeated multiple times since the 1940s, including this year, which would tend to keep conditions for melting in place.

In short, the idea that human carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to the Thwaites Glacier’s decline is pure speculation; speculation seemingly refuted by the significant decline in surface temperature where the glacier resides, and the net gain of ice and snow on Antarctica. The Thwaites Glacier is bucking climate trends in West Antarctica and for the continent as a whole, almost surely because of El Nino warmed waters.

Climate change is not causing the Thwaites Glacier’s decline. Even still it would be prudent to plan for higher sea levels, regardless of trends for the Thwaites Glacier, because they are rising, although not at a historically rapid rate. Seas always rise between ice ages, and history suggests that they will continue to rise, with fits and starts, until the next ice age commences.

Electric 18-wheelers are even stupider than electric cars

The cost of the trucks themselves must also be considered. Currently, a brand new diesel-powered 18-wheeler is priced at between $150,000 – $180,000, but ATRI says a new electric model goes for almost triple that, at between $400,00 – $500,000.

Yet another sequence of ruinously expensive technical miracles required.

“It still boggles my mind,” says Jeffrey Short, Vice President of the American Transport Research Institute.

Mr. Short was talking about the findings of a study conducted by ATRI recently, which quantifies how much additional power generation capacity would have to be added to America’s existing electric grid to convert the nation’s entire heavy truck fleet to battery electric vehicles. The Telegraph has the story.

“What we found were three very large challenges,” Short told the Capital Press, and ‘very large’ is quite an understatement of the magnitude of the real problem here. The numbers seem overwhelming. 

First, ATRI finds that US nationwide power generation would need to increase 40 per cent over the coming years just to accommodate the additional load placed on the various regional grids to recharge all the new heavy truck batteries. Taken in a vacuum that may sound achievable to the layperson. But no such vacuum exists: The added load must be found in addition to massive new loads being demanded for low-emissions heating, passenger vehicle charging, population growth and economic expansion, server farms, and even AI, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said will itself require a doubling of power generation. 

Where will all the new power generation, and all the new supplies of critical minerals needed to make it reality, come from? ATRI estimates that converting the heavy truck fleet will require the US to somehow source a volume of lithium alone that equates to 35 years of current global production of that key mineral. Expanding the grid and making all the millions of heavy new truck batteries will also require massive new resources of copper, cobalt, graphite, antimony, and an array of rare earth minerals not currently in widespread production within US borders. 

All this additional production will have to come available to the US market rapidly. But, as S&P Global Vice Chairman Daniel Yergin reminded me in a recent interview, “it currently takes 15 to 20 years to open a new mine” in the US, due to a vast array of permitting and litigation impediments. China controls the supply lines for most such minerals today, and the Xi government will satisfy its own needs and those of its allies before it would be willing to release massively higher volumes to the US and other western nations.

The cost of the trucks themselves must also be considered. Currently, a brand new diesel-powered 18-wheeler is priced at between $150,000 – $180,000, but ATRI says a new electric model goes for almost triple that, at between $400,00 – $500,000. Higher truck costs, higher power costs, and higher transport costs will inevitably lead to higher rates of inflation since most consumer goods are moved to market by 18-wheelers. 

Read the full story here.

Claims Of Wettest Winter Are Fake

He was lying, because it was a long way from being the wettest winter.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

I have come across suggestions that this winter has been the wettest on record. One claim in particular came on GB News on Saturday from Donnachadh McCarthy, the extremist environmentalist, who is often allowed to get away unchallenged with blatant incorrect statements. His claim, he said, came from Met Office data.

He was lying, because it was a long way from being the wettest winter.

He did not say which region he was talking about, but in the UK as a whole, it was only 8th wettest, in England the 6th and in Wales the 8th wettest. (The show discussed the Welsh Govt’s decision to rewild/reforest 20% of farmland ):

Mention was made by McCarthy of a rainfall series going back to the 18thC, so presumably he was talking of the England & Wales series, which also shows 2023/24 as being the 6th wettest:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/seasonal/HadEWP_seasonal_totals.txt

It is frustrating how extremists such as McCarthy and Jim Dale not only get so much airtime, but are also allowed to get away with blatant mistruths.

Weakest link for EV’s is in China’s supply chain

Consequentially, China isn’t the only EV supply chain threat.

From CFACT

Federal and state energy policies, now pushing electric vehicles on a reluctant public, are running in conflict with other social and environmental restrictions banning vital materials and component imports.

As consequences, U.S. and European auto companies are racing into Chinese rare earth monopoly and other supply traps posing inevitable economic and national security threats.

American EV consumers who ride along will be left in a ditch along with dealers who lack essential inventory and profitable markets.

This is already occurring.

U.S. customs officials have seized thousands of German Volkswagens over a single part made in China’s Xinjiang region, believed to be in violation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which requires importers to provide evidence that their goods were not produced with forced labor in order to avoid penalties.

The German company is a joint venture partner with Chinese-owned SAIC Motors, which owns a factory in Xinjing’s capital, Urumqi.

Volkswagen was previously linked to such a violation when the German newspaper Handelsblatt reportedly obtained photographs showing Uyghur workers in military uniforms during the three-year construction of a car-testing track.

As reported in the Financial Times, U.S. authorities have also impounded and are investigating luxury brands produced by Porsche, Bentley, and Audi over suspected UFPLA violations involving electronic components, resulting in delivery delays of uncertain length.

A recent Human Rights Watch report has also warned that carmakers, including Tesla, General Motors, Volkswagen, and Toyota, are failing to ensure they aren’t using aluminum produced by Uyghur forced labor.

Aluminum is used extensively in EV manufacture as a mileage economy measure to compensate for heavy battery weight.

Whereas Tesla owns a factory in Shanghai that builds cars for both Chinese and international markets, they had reportedly tracked its supply chain back to the mining level without evidence of forced labor.

Then, factor in influences of new and existing environmental regulations influencing rare earth mining and processing for batteries, which represent a major EV cost

Biden administration’s anti-drilling and pro-EV policies have made America increasingly dependent on rare earth minerals mined for those batteries under atrocious slave labor and environmental conditions bureaucrats ignore.

China controls a stranglehold monopoly of about 80% of the global supply, with Congo a 90% source of vital cobalt.

As a consequence, Mountain Pass in California, the sole remaining operational U.S. rare earth mine that lost two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy, incredulously continues to send its mined ore to China for processing.

Expect those battery costs to escalate in concert with increased global demands for nickel — a primary component of lithium-ion cathodes — having already risen over six years from $10,336 per metric ton in August 2016 to $16,104 currently.

Purchasers should consider that, with a Tesla battery typically costing about $10,000, their resale price will likely have to be significantly higher than that of a comparably aged and sized internal combustion model in similar condition.

Also, expect that on the resale end, an average on-the-road 12-year-old used EV will be on its second or third new battery before an owner can sell it.

Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Honda, Nissan, and Subaru have meanwhile all had to adjust new model sales prices upward due to the scarcity of semiconductors, a supply condition that will only become more precarious if and when government-mandated EV numbers multiply.

Currently, despite huge auto investments and government subsidies, this isn’t happening.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, in September of last year, it took retailers over two months to sell an EV, compared with around a month for gas-powered vehicles and only three weeks for a gas-electric hybrid.

Falling demand and rising prices have prompted Ford to cut previously planned 2024 production of its F-150 electric truck in half after losing $60,000 on each EV sold while also pausing construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan.

Facing similar realities, General Motors has said it will delay opening a planned large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand”.

This slowdown and resulting industry business losses are occurring both despite and in addition to generous $7,500 federal tax credit subsidies offered as EV incentives to reluctant buyers and jacked-up costs for gasoline models consumers truly want to keep vehicle manufacturers financially afloat.

Consequentially, China isn’t the only EV supply chain threat.

A 2024 political climate change returning the presidency and Congress to Republican control will hopefully replace that EV subsidy supply chain with free market choices that will end the greatest threat of all — Biden and Beijing’s influence over what we buy and drive.

This article by Larry Bell originally appeared at NewsMax

Exxon CEO: “The people who are generating those [CO2] emissions need to … pay the price”

Green energy is not cheap, it is hideously expensive. You just need to look at runaway energy prices in California and Europe, both champions of green energy, to know how expensive real world green energy is.

Exxon CEO Darren Woods

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Exxon CEO Darren Woods has incensed greens by suggesting end users are responsible for generating emissions.

Fury after Exxon chief says public to blame for climate failures

Darren Woods tells Fortune consumers not willing to pay for clean-energy transition, prompting backlash from climate experts

The world is off track to meet its climate goals and the public is to blame, Darren Woods, chief executive of oil giant ExxonMobil, has claimed – prompting a backlash from climate experts.

As the world’s largest investor-owned oil company, Exxon is among the top contributors to global planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions. But in an interview, published on Tuesday, Woods argued that big oil is not primarily responsible for the climate crisis.

The real issue, Woods said, is that the clean-energy transition may prove too expensive for consumers’ liking.

“The dirty secret nobody talks about is how much all this is going to cost and who’s willing to pay for it,” he told Fortune last week. “The people who are generating those emissions need to be aware of and pay the price for generating those emissions. That is ultimately how you solve the problem.”

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“It’s like a drug lord blaming everyone but himself for drug problems,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia business school.

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Wagner said that Exxon was touting its ambition to slash the emissions of its own operations while also betting that the rest of the world won’t do the same, in order to continue selling oil.

“He can’t have it both ways in saying ‘we are an energy company’ but then basically ignoring the cheapest source of electricity in history as something Exxon should be investing in,” he said.

…Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/04/exxon-chief-public-climate-failures

A video of CEO Darren Woods being interviewed by Fortune Magazine.

The “Dirty Secret” comments are made around 18:43. Woods also said that “Today’s technology will not solve this problem”, and emphasised the importance of getting the cost down, and the need for cost transparency with end users – and how important getting the cost down is for people’s willingness to pay for Net Zero.

Woods called for a carbon price (23:10 minutes).

30:55 “I will tell you today, there is not a viable market where consumers step in and are willing to pay a premium for low carbon products. That is the reality of what we face today. I can’t drive demand, and I can’t make consumers pay more for low carbon products”.

The big question – why are Greens so upset with what Exxon CEO Darren Woods said? Darren’s responses to questions in the video amounted to suggesting the government needs to do more to make low carbon options palatable, by putting a price on carbon, by supporting efforts to bring down the price of green solutions, or both.

I think what upset Greens is the Exxon CEO’s suggestion that Greens have to take personal responsibility for their piece of the Net Zero transition.

And of course, greens were likely upset by the Exxon CEOs suggestion that green energy is expensive – which contradicts Columbia Business School Gernot Wagner’s claim that Exxon is “ignoring [renewables] the cheapest source of electricity in history” – at least I presume he is talking about renewables.

Wagner’s inference that renewables are cheap is absurd.

Green energy is not cheap, it is hideously expensive. You just need to look at runaway energy prices in California and Europe, both champions of green energy, to know how expensive real world green energy is.

Even worse, the cost of energy in places like California and Europe is not a problem with implementation. Google admitted Net Zero is impossibly expensive in 2014, with an article published in Spectrum, about their failed attempt to discover an economically viable path to Net Zero. “Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.“. The Google team failed to find an economically viable path to replacing coal with renewables, even when they added science fiction assumptions to their models, like wind towers which erect themselves without human assistance. The Google study authors were not advocating giving up, they were just saying more or less the same as Exxon CEO Darren Woods said in the video above. Today’s green energy technology is not a viable solution to the world’s energy needs.

Can you think of a more woke, leftist, green leaning company than Google? If even Google say green energy with current technology cannot work, perhaps Google are also part of Wagner’s conspiracy of energy company capitalists who are plotting to reduce their own profits?

Blaming Exxon, weaving bizarre big oil conspiracy theories, and responding with fury to the suggestion that greens themselves have to take personal responsibility – well I guess we’re all used to seeing that from greens.

We are also used to seeing lots of hypocrisy from greens. Greens have not exactly been champions of the lifestyle choices they want to inflict on everyone else, somehow the special people usually give themselves a moral pass from the rules they want to inflict on the rest of us.

I don’t know if Gernot Wagner is personally a green hypocrite, but plenty of his fellow travellers are. I mean, how often have we seen greens jetting off to climate conferences and making pathetic excuses for why they should be allowed to fly, while demanding everyone else have their flights rationed for the sake of the planet?

Who can forget embarrassing failures of greens to follow their own policy prescriptions, like the German Green Party’s hilariously expensive failure to install a functioning heat pump in their own headquarters, despite demanding Germany immediately pass laws which make such heat pumps mandatory for office buildings?

If Greens want the rest of us to even consider following their lead, they need to start practicing what they preach, by showing us through personal example that Net Zero is viable and affordable, instead of blaming others like Exxon CEO Darren Woods for their own personal failure to transition to a greener lifestyle.

Seismic update on rapid drop off of SST forecasted

The startling drop off in (Sea Surface Temperatures) SSTs forecasted by the US-generated CFSV2 is not that big a deal in the La Nina areas.

From CFACT

BY JOE BASTARDI:

The startling drop off in (Sea Surface Temperatures) SSTs forecasted by the US-generated CFSV2 is not that big a deal in the La Nina areas. We knew that was coming last year and said so as part of the climate hypothesis I have developed. But it’s the rest of the ocean that is amazing. If the CFSV2 is to be believed, the drop from now to November is unprecedented.

The Indian Ocean drop is mind-boggling.

As I have been pushing there is next to no way of knowing what is going on till after it occurs.  Our data buoys only cover an area of 1 every 111,200  square miles down to 6,000 ft, laughable given the average depth of the ocean is 14k feet and it has 99% of the energy of the ocean-atmosphere system. Its almost as if  the powers that be don’t want to know what is happening.

I mentioned that I would report what Dr Viterito is supplying me with. Here is the latest:

Hi Joe,

We are seeing a leveling of mid-ocean global seismic activity. Here is the latest data from the GCMT catalog:

Two things to note here:

1) The final tally isn’t in yet for 2023. GCMT’s catalog is 3 to 4 months behind (they currently have 2023 complete through October).

My note. This is what I am talking about. We have to wait to see if what you see starting above is continuing. What is going on is to sustain the warmth you need to keep it at high levels, any reversal would lead to cooling. Again, once the buoys see the cooling, this can get into the model. But who knows what the heck is going on. That the model is seeing this kind of drop is already startling.

Back to Dr Viterito. By the way, there does seem to be a significant drop in total activity, and that may be a precursor to mid-ocean frequencies.

The correlations between global temperatures and our seismic signal are way too high (0.73) for this all to be a coincidence. Here is the complete analysis through the end of 2023:

2) Global temperatures lag the seismic signal by 2 years. (My note: this would seem to argue that the warmer it is, the quicker a response may occur, which might make sense as it’s tough to keep things so extreme… lesser variations would have a longer lag.) This year has started out very  warm (0.88 deg C above base) and even modest cooling will bring this back to recent norms.

My note: This is laughable, if not negligent. It’s absurd to that we think we can figure out what is going on in the ocean.

Equally important is that the ARGO deep data (the data from 6,000 m) is very sparse. As of 2019, there were something like 65 Argo Deep buoys in place, and, as it stands now, there are only a few hundred in operation. Furthermore, the total ARGO deep database will be derived from 1250 buoys. On a global scale, that’s one deep buoy for every 111,200 square miles of ocean (or one deep buoy for each 333 x 333-mile grid square)!! Furthermore, plans are for it to be a concentrated network, with the majority of units situated in the tropical oceans and the Western Boundary Currents, not the mid-ocean ridges.

As I liked to tell my students, this is the Best Available Documented data, or BAD data for short.

As a final anecdote, I used to also tell my students that weather forecasting is akin to creating a painting, whereas climate analysis is like watching the paint dry.

Back to me:

In any case, this is going to be very interesting. But what a shame that we are making all these judgments on what is driving all this without looking at the source of most of the energy. But if the CFSV2 is right, this can not be explained from man-made sources. It’s likely getting data showing cooling and if we see that there was a drop off, the hypothesis would have to have some merit.