Day: April 16, 2024

UK Crippled by Own Climate Policy (Darwall)

So the the critical thing to understand about the energy transition
is it means you need more more resources to produce less.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

In the video Rupert Darwall is interviewed by Lee Hall discussing the plight of UK obsessing over global warming/climate change.  For those preferring to read, below is an excerpted transcript lightly edited from closed captions.  In italics with my bolds and added images. (RD is Rupert Darwall and LH is Lee Hall)

Keynotes

Britain is in a deep in a growth trap and we’ll remain in this growth trap. You know someone says if you’re in a hole stop digging. What we’re doing with Net Zero, we’re just digging harder and harder.

Today environmentalism is against economic growth and the green policies allow the ultra wealthy to feel virtuous. If you’re a multi-billionaire, like say Mike Bloomberg, you love it. Because what can you do to protect yourself from people complaining about your wealth? Well I’m saving the planet he says.

Europe’s green push is bringing economic benefit but not to Europe. German trade unions were promised during at the beginning of the energy transition there would be lots of green jobs and there were . . . in China. That’s where the green jobs went.

Green Policies and Economics

LH:  Let’s talk about green policies and economics and how to really understand it all.

RD: So setting the scene: 2008 was quite a tough year and we had the financial crisis but then we also had the Climate Change Act. And was there a connection between Britain’s economic woes and then the introduction of what was arguably the most extreme green policies in the world.

The British economy was deeply scarred by the financial crisis and its trend growth of productivity has basically flatlined since 2008, and as you point out 2008 is the same year that parliament passed the Climate Change Act. Which as a result saw huge amounts of capital deployed on very low yielding to negative yielding assets in the power generation sector; namely wind and solar.

It’s very difficult to disentangle the long-term effects of the financial crisis and the so-called energy transition. But it is unquestionably the case that mandating very aggressive decarbonization worsens the productive potential of the economy. To give you an idea of how bad is the energy transition for a Net Zero: The International Energy Agency produced a net zero plan, and by 2030 under its Net Zero assumptions, the global energy sector will be employing 25 million more people using 16 and a half trillion more dollars of capital. 16 and a half trillion dollars more Capital using vast land areas of the combined size of Mexico, France, California, New Mexico and Texas to produce 7% less energy.

So the the critical thing to understand about the energy transition
is it means you need more more resources to produce less.

That’s exactly what we’re seeing, what effect the push for Renewables has had on our Energy prices, and thus on our economy and our competitiveness. Well it’s made Britain one of the most expensive places in the world for businesses in terms of of the electricity bills. We’re seeing steel making basically being put out of business in this country. We’re seeing oil refining with the Grangemouth oil refinery being closed. The petrochemical industry is going to have a very hard time to survive.

So a lot of industry is basically going to be wiped out. But then you look at the automotive industry where we have effectively mandates for EV adoption requiring rising proportions of car sales must be EV. If car manufacturers don’t meet those targets, they get taxed and that will basically lead to almost obliterating the British automotive industry, apart from some really very upscale names like Bentley. Essentially you’re looking at the death of the British automotive sector.

LH: Could you give us a a Layman’s introduction to what’s happened with wind power in Britain and what this teaches us about environmentalism?

RD: In 2022 Boris Johnson said offshore wind is the the cheapest form of electricity in the country. It was a line fed to him by Carbon Brief, which is heavily funded by the European Climate Foundation, which in turn is funded by multi-billion philanthropic foundations in the US. It is pure propaganda; there is not any basis for saying that.

Remember that at the time of the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, then about 40% of the increase of the natural gas price was actually artificial carbon taxes and the price of carbon. So take that that out; these are completely artificial. This cost isn’t about supply and demand of fossil fuels, it is simply government imposed taxes to basically tax natural gas production out of the system.

Then offshore wind is inherently expensive. If you think about it, putting very large wind turbines in the middle of a hostile marine environment like the North Sea you need to have a big question mark over it. This defies common sense. What happened was the wind industry telling the government and the government believing that the cost of offshore wind was about 50 pounds per megawatt hour. In fact analysis of the accounting data for the financial entities shows that the break even price of North Sea power above 100 pounds per megawatt hour.

Basically the wind industry had conned the government into saying wind is cheap. And of course then they’ve now turned around and said actually our costs are a lot higher than you thought. But you’ve got the climate change act which gives a legal Duty on the government to reach Net Zero. So if you don’t give us more subsidy you’ll be defying your legal duty to reach Net Zero, and we just might take you to court to to have the courts decide whether you are.

LH: We heard recently Constraint Payments that there may be a watchdog investigation into wind farms for overcharging on constraint payments, the constraint payments being getting paid to not produce electricity. Can you help us understand the logic behind this? So they get paid to not produce something then they’re overcharging on the nothing?

RD: Yes, the problem is kind of obvious when you see that the more wind capacity you have, when the wind’s blowing the more electricity is produced and that creates two problems. It may be in excess of demand so you have a sharp fall in the wholesale price of electricity. Which incidentally means that gas generators start to be loss making, and it’s very bad for the economics of the power stations that are needed to keep the lights on. It can actually go negative so you pay them to constrain.

The other thing is that the wind turbines are in remote windy locations and they have to be connected to the grid and there’s simply not enough grid connection. So the wind operators are saying well you need to you need more grid infrastructure. Well that’s not free, but they won’t pay for it, they’re expecting consumers to to pick up the tab. And indeed ofgem the energy regulator has a sort of policy, what they call socializing the cost of grid connection, so they’re picked up by customers rather than by the investors.

LH: People that push Green Growth, the green policies, are talking about green growth and green jobs a lot of the time. It seems they they don’t really materialize and we end up paying more to produce less in a less efficient way. I mean is the environmentalism actually an anti-growth strategy?

RD: In Germany for example the German trade unions were promised during at the beginning of the so-called energy transition there’ll be lots of green jobs. And there’s workers in China, that’s where the green jobs are, they’re not in Europe. I mean Europe is not competitive, doesn’t have the low energy cost that China has. To make this kit is very, very energy intensive.

Since the limits to growth debates of the early 1970s in fact limits to growth came out in 1972, greens have argued that economic growth will destroy the planet. And therefore growth is bad. Now they’re turning around and saying well we’re going to have green growth. Well don’t believe it, you should really believe that they are against growth and that their policies are designed have to knock growth on the head. That’s what we’re seeing now.

This kind of degrowth, anti-growth push is very bad news, for people’s living standards, for their aspirations, for their wanting to have a better life for their children; having greater opportunities, more enjoyable ways to to spend money, to spend your life. All that’s true but also growth is needed to fund the state and to fund fund public services. Having had very little growth since 2008, essentially green policies mean endless austerity, it means extremely high tax rates. The tax burden in Britain is the highest it’s been since since I think the late 1940s, since the post war period. So yes it’s very bad both for private consumption but also for public consumption, also public investment.

Britain has a very low level of public investment. Also we have a very low level of private investment So all together in Britain we find ourselves deep in a growth trap. And we’ll remain in this growth trap. You know someone says if you’re in a hole stop digging. What we’re doing with Net Zero is we’re just digging harder and harder.

LH: Marxism policy is to take the means of production away from private ownership whereas what we’re looking at now is to almost destroy the means of production. I often make the point, that in some respects environmentalism is a more radical ideology. Marxism is about changing the ownership of the means of production. This is about changing the means of production themselves.

RD: The early marxists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, actually if you look at the Communist Manifesto, there’s this great Paean of praise to capitalism and the Bourgeois for creating these fantastic means of production that that have unlocked hitherto unknown levels of prosperity. Of course as we just discussed the greens are very much against that. But what where the greens score is although it’s a radical ideology in terms of changing the means of production and degrading the means of production, it is very socially conservative. It doesn’t challenge the existing social hierarchy.

So if you’re a member of the a feudal royal family like King Charles, you like green stuff. It doesn’t say Dethrone him or cut off their heads. If you’re a plutocrat, if you’re a multi-billionaire like say Mike Bloomberg in the US, you love it because again is what you do to protect yourself from people complaining about your wealth. You say well I’m I’m saving the planet. I’m using my money, my business and my philanthropy is about saving the planet.

So on the one hand, economically it’s very radical, but socially it’s all about
maintaining existing social stratifications and of course denying
people lower down the means to rise up, to better themselves.

LH: So in the original Marxism the rich guy or the top was the bad guy, but now those Rich guys can actually be the good guys in the environmentalism.

RD: The way I put it is that green policies and decarbonization are ethics for the super wealthy. You see Bill Gates when he gets asked in interviews, what about your carbon foot footprint, he’s got so much money he pays an enormous amount to have carbon dioxide sucked out of the air, direct air capture. Well of course you can do that if you’re if you’re one of the richest people on the planet. But of course but for ordinary people when they take their holiday to the Mediterranean if you’re going to expect them to pay hundreds of pounds extra, I mean it’s not going to happen. So yes this is about the super wealthy.

Another example of virtuous contradictions would be to look at say wind farms or solar panel farms. That’s supposed to be good for the environment but they’re destroying the landscape and they’re destroying the habitats and they’re chopping up birds, killing insects and threatening whales.

LH: This environmentalism expects us to suspend our beliefs to some degree yeah this is what you pointed out is a fundamental contradiction deep in the heart of modern environmentalism. It’s like saying, to save the village we had to destroy it.

RD: It is absolutely clear that the environmentalists don’t care about this. Fundamentally it’s about the precautionary principle so you’ve got to be extra specially careful. But not when it comes to wind power; they’re perfectly okay with with wind turbines destroying nature, since they see it as saving the planet.

So for the greater good we need to ruin some of the planet
to save the the greater Planet.

The error is that as soon as you go from the local to the global, you sacrifice the local. And of course the global is an aggregate of the locals but for them it isn’t. This maniacal obsession with carbon dioxide emissions which has led to this tragedy that so much nature is being destroyed in the name of saving nature which it won’t do.

LH: When Rishi Sunak was Chancellor Exchequer he talked about rewiring the global financial system for Net Zero and then redeploying $130 trillion dollar of assets can you help us understand like how that would be possible and and tell us about the role that ESG is playing.

RD: He made that that speech at the Glasgow climate conference, in my opinion the single worst speech ever given by any Chancellor of Exchequer of either party. It was an absolutely appalling speech because essentially he’s saying private savings should be socialized to meet public policy objectives.  ESG is very much a part of the socialization of private savings. ESG is basically politics by other means Instead of government saying we’re going to pass laws and regulations and raise taxes and spend lots of money ourselves doing it. We are going to pass regulations and we’re going to browbeat business to do this for us.

There’s a twofold cost in that. One is to investors whose capital is being basically expropriated, is being used by politicians. And the other is to Consumers who pay higher prices as a result. ESG is a very malign trend in in finance. It’s very interesting to look what’s been happening in the United States where it’s in retreat for for basically two reasons. First of all because the anti-green stocks, if you like, that is the oil and gas sector suddenly in the covid recovery suddenly put on great growth spurt in the stock market. So if you weren’t in oil and gas stocks you lost out.

And secondly there’s been a big reaction in in Republican states against these ESG mandates. However in Britain and Europe ESG continues. The government is effectively telling businesses they have to come up with Net Zero transition plans, so ESG is alive well and doing a lot of damage in Britain and Europe. In the US we saw Texas divest about 8 billion dollars from Black Rock because of their ESG measures.

LH: I mean do you think we we’ll see anything like that here or is that very much an American approach

RD: If you like the strength and vibrancy of capitalism in America there is not a peep of that in the UK or Europe. Britain’s largest asset manager is LGIM, Legal & General Investment Management, and it is completely signed up to the Net Zero ESG agenda. There’s very little sign of a backlash. Local authorities turn to be green they want to they say they want they invest want to invest their pension funds in in some nice ESG ways. You have the university superannuation funds. Universities are all kind of green and woke and so forth. so there there is unfortunately.  You’ve seen that the London Stock Market until just recently, the last few weeks or so, has massively under performed the S&P 500 in the states.

LH: We seeing this contradiction again, but if I invest some money in a big investment firm, I’d expect them to use it to make money instead they’re using it for ideological means.

RD: There was this the ESG sales patter that it was doing well by doing good. They said we’ll use your money to do good and by the way you will make more money doing that than you otherwise would. That was always rubbish, it defied modern Financial portfolio Theory. But they got away with it until about 2022 when oil stocks did extremely well, had a very strong run on on the stock market.

The other thing to point out, ESG used to exclude any defense stocks because armor manufacturers are evil and so forth. Then Putin invades Ukraine and they suddenly wake up saying, well actually we should have defense contractors in there. So it’s completely muddled, an ill-defined concept that is made up as it goes along.

And there’s also why should it be fund managers taking these really important decisions about things like defense and National Security. These are preeminently decisions and policies for politicians not for market traders.

LH: You’ve very much got your finger on Green and economic issues. Are there any things coming up that you think we should keep an eye out for that are going surprises in the coming year?

RD: The big thing will be what happens in the American elections in November. On the one hand you have the Biden Administration which has set itself a net zero policy goal. The EPA is making a rule which will really take coal Off the Grid. It will cut massively the amount of natural gas power they’ve got on the grid. Biden has imposed a moratorium on new permits for export of natural gas.

On the other hand you have Trump who believes in what he calls American Energy dominance, he’s a hydrocarbon politician. He’s actually the only Western leader of the last couple of decades who is what I call an energy realist, who really understands energy. In his first term as president he pulled out of the Paris climate agreement. I think he would do the same again, and if that happens it will raise a huge question mark. What is the sense of persisting with Net Zero if the second largest emitter in the world pulls out of the the Paris agreement?

LH: I think it will it really kill Net Zero to anyone intelligent looking at it. We already had India and China not really buying in, but for America to join them?

RD: There is the conceit of the structure of the Paris agreement in these nationally determined contributions. So what China and India have been doing is they they’re not pledging any Cuts. They say well the carbon intensity of our economy will decline over time, which it will do anyway. One of the interesting facts of Britain is that when Rishi Sunak and British politicians boast about Britain cutting its carbon emissions. Britain’s CO2 emissions peaked in 1972 and you know as economies mature they tend to become less carbon intensive; that’s been the case in Britain.

What has happened since 2008 as we discussed at the beginning, that has been massively accelerated with quite a lot of damaging effect on manufacturing, on Energy prices um on the grid reliability and so forth.

LH: If Trump did get in and and pulled out of the agreement in that way, do you think the UK will follow along or oppose? What do you think will happen here?

RD: I don’t think a Keir Starmer government would follow particularly given Ed Miliband in the position of Energy Secretary, who was Energy Secretary when the 2008 climate Act was passed. He was at the Copenhagen conference in 2009 and played quite an important part there. There is no way they are going to have second thoughts on it.

What will change or what could change is the conservatives in opposition might actually begin to smell the coffee and say actually this is this is a really bad idea this Net Zero costs us votes, it costs people money, and therefore we need to question it. so I think the I think it will change the dynamic of politics in this country particularly if Trump were to repeat what he did between 2016 and 2020.

LH: Will there be an opposition Conservative party think in like five years time we could be seeing an opposition conservative party that’s against a lot of the green policies and quite different from what it is now?

RD: That’s a possibility. The problem is that when when a party goes into opposition quite often as happened in 1997 essentially the conservative party had a collective nervous breakdown and gave up on conservatism. That’s essentially what happened and it went through that long period and it was completely enamored with with Tony Blair and the promise of David Cameron and George Osborne.

Well are we are going to emulate Tony Blair and we’re going to get the conservative party to love the leftward drift of British politics?  Will that happen again? Well Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair is he? But on the other hand the ability of the conservative party to really screw things up should never be underestimated.

$100 Billion per Year Needed for US Carbon Removal

The demand for $100 billion per year, to fix a problem which only exists in the fevered imagination of broken computer models, is beyond parody.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

The demand for $100 billion per year, to fix a problem which only exists in the fevered imagination of broken computer models, is beyond parody.

The U.S. Will Need to Spend $100 Billon a Year on Carbon Removal

APRIL 11, 2024
BY CORBIN HIAR & E&E NEWS

The U.S. needs to vastly increase taxpayer spending on direct carbon removal technology to meet President Biden’s climate goals, the Rhodium Group says.

CLIMATEWIRE | The U.S. government needs to spend roughly $100 billion annually on carbon dioxide removal by 2050 to help the world avoid extreme climate change, according to an analysis released Wednesday.

That’s 20 times more than what lawmakers committed to in landmark climate bills that aimed to jump-start the development of carbon removal technologies and companies, the Rhodium Group estimated. For context, the sum is also about as much as the entire budget of the Department of Agriculture.

The new analysis comes amid a fierce battle for control of Congress, the White House and the future of U.S. climate policy. The Republican Party is rallying behind former President Donald Trump, whose campaign has promised that if reelected he would “oppose all of the radical left’s Green New Deal policies.”

But Rhodium’s calculations could also bolster progressive critics of carbon dioxide removal who view government subsidies for the costly technology as a distraction in the fight against rising temperatures. Carbon removal companies use a variety of natural and engineered approaches to boost the carbon absorbing capacity of the planet.

…Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-carbon-removal-needs-have-a-usd100-billion-price-tag-per-year/

Even Dr. Evil didn’t have the arrogance to demand annual payments of $100 billion, he just wanted a one off payment.

I used to wonder why the ancient Egyptians wasted so much money and effort building pyramids, when they could have used those resources to better the lives of their people.

I guess we all have the answer to that question now: Some ancient Egyptian claimed their computer model said it was necessary to spend vast resources on pyramid building, that the gods would be angry if they didn’t provide for their pharaohs in the afterlife. And for 1200 years, between 2700BC to 1500BC, nobody questioned the computer model prediction.

Let us hope the people of our society prove a little more adept at asking the right questions.

The University of Tennessee stonewalled our public records request so I took them to court

The University of Tennessee doesn’t want us to know about the biased manner in which they use our taxes to advocate a radical energy agenda.

From CFACT

By Kathleen Marquardt

The University of Tennessee doesn’t want us to know about the biased manner in which they use our taxes to advocate a radical energy agenda.

I took them to court.

Over four years ago, someone sent me a November 2019 Huffington Post article titled “Coal Knew, Too” by Élan Young, a writer for the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of (UTK). The story, remarkably, also promptly appeared in Mother Jones, the UK’s Daily Mail, and even in an article from the Kent Law School. We were told that the Department head, Chris Cherry, “accidentally discovered what is, so far, the earliest known evidence of the coal industry acknowledging its awareness of the impending climate crisis”.

The supposed “confession”, which fit nicely into an ongoing activist litigation campaign, appeared in plain sight in a 1966 article in the Mining Congress Journal.  This general-interest mining publication merely repeated the theory of greenhouse global warming.

“Coal Knew, Too” is a spin-off of the activist campaign “Exxon Knew” “conceived during a 2012 workshop in La Jolla, Calif., sponsored by wealthy, anti-fossil fuel foundations (including the Rockefeller Family Fund), where activists strategized about how to replicate the success of the lawsuits against “Big Tobacco” by “establishing accountability for climate change damages.” That soon became Utilities Knew Too to rope in coal.

The first entrant in the litigation sweepstakes was the New York Attorney General. Public records show the Rockefeller Family Fund lobbied New York to prosecute.  Interestingly, the New York Attorney General’s Exxon Knew fraud case bombed – big time.  And made significant headlines for it, two examples:

New York Post editorial board: “New York AG’s office totally disgraced itself in the Exxon trial”

Paul S. Atkins, a former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said, “NY’s pathetic case against Exxon is outrageous abuse of prosecutorial powers.”

Journalist Katie Brown at Energy in Depth put it best in an article she called, “Feeling the heat, inside climate news finally admits #exxonknew collusion between AGs and activists”:

“Over the past several weeks, the well-funded, highly orchestrated #ExxonKnew campaign has continued to be exposed for what it is, with several majornews outlets now reporting on closed-door meetings that took place between activists, wealthy foundations, law firms, and media websites, in an effort to attack Exxon. Newly revealed emails even show these activists held secret talks with the state attorneys general long before articles written by Inside Climate News and the Columbia School of Journalism were published – directly contradicting claims made by the attorney general of New York and others that those articles were the impetus behind their actions.”

“Coal Knew, Too” was absurd on a few fronts, but the campaign is a serious one. Regardless, this involved the UTK professor and a UTK writer using their positions and the school’s website to launch the “Coal Knew!” branch of the campaign, checking that box of a media push against one class of defendants, the “Knew, Too!” tort bar is suing to extract billions and turn into lobbyists for the “climate”/energy-rationing agenda. How this use of the public/taxpayer’s resources came about is found in public records, and the public has a right to know what is in them.

So, I sent a request to Professor Cherry seeking emails containing one or more of three keywords/phrases: 1. Mining Congress Journal, 2. Coal, and 3. Climate change. These would reveal the record of how this came about on the taxpayers’ dime.

I submitted the request on December 4, 2019, and it became a seemingly never-ending ride on the MTA. After numerous delays in responding, my request “was denied in its entirety.” My lawyer went back and forth with the UTK over this for months, getting delays and, finally, another denial, even though the Tennessee Code gives entitlement to access to public records.

The University forced me to sue to see them, and here we are more than four years later, still trying to gain access to the school’s participation in Left-wing activism based on false premises.

Why would I want to see these documents? What business is it of mine? As a candidate for president once said, “I paid for this microphone. The emails would inform the taxpayer 1) how and why the engineering school sought to use taxpayer resources to promote an ideological plaintiffs’ and media campaign in a breathless write-up pitched to outlets worldwide. This seems to me to be outside of the school’s norm. Don’t you think? 2) This is all based on the silliest of premises — a trade journal article acknowledging the existence of the greenhouse warming theory.

Let’s look at the article that drew my attention – and ire, “Coal Knew, Too”. The first paragraph set the tone (and turned on my “woke-wacko” alert):

“’Exxon Knew’. Thanks to the work of activists and journalists, those two words have rocked the politics of climate change in recent years, as investigations revealed the extent to which giants like Exxon Mobil and Shell were aware of the danger of rising greenhouse gas emissions even as they undermined the work of scientists.”

That raises the question, “Which scientists?” As one article in the literature wrote: “Whether most scientists outside climatology believe that global warming is happening is less relevant than whether the climatologists do. A letter signed by over 50 leading members of the American Meteorological Society warned about the policies promoted by environmental pressure groups. “The policy initiatives derive from highly uncertain scientific theories. They are based on the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuel and requires immediate action. We do not agree.” Those who have signed the letter represent the overwhelming majority of climate change scientists in the United States, of whom there are about 60. McMichael and Haines quote the 1995 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is widely believed to “prove” that climate change induced by humans has occurred. The original draft document did not say this. What happened was that the policymakers’ summary (which became the “take home message” for politicians) altered the conclusions of the scientists. This led Dr. Frederick Seitz, former head of the United States National Academy of Sciences, to write, “In more than sixty years as a member of the American scientific community … I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

In 1966, when the article from the Mining Congress Journal was written, global warming was not a hot issue. That was global cooling – or, better said, global freezing. Even as late as 1977, greenhouse warming was not a political campaign but a theory, as mentioned in many places, including a ten-year-old trade journal article. The book The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age was a bible of environmentalists then. So, what will be the next “threat to society from those wanting to control the world? They are still operating under the Club of Rome’s philosophy: “The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill. All of these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Public institutions must never be allowed to stonewall public records requests from the taxpayers who fund them.  Free speech and full disclosure are the path to sound science, reason, and logic.

Comprehensive Russian Temperature Reconstruction Shows Warmer Temperatures 1000 Years Ago!

Dr. Michael E. Mann and the IPCC claims of a hockey stick temperature trend are challenged.

From NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin

Dr. Michael E. Mann and the IPCC claims of a hockey stick temperature trend are challenged.

A paper published by a team of scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences led by В. V. Klimenko presents a quantitative reconstruction of the mean annual temperatures of northeastern Europe for the last two millennia. The study was done in cooperation with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany).

kompleksnaya-rekonstrukciya-temperatury-rossiyskoy-arktiki-za-poslednie-dva-tysyHerunterladen

Result: it was modestly warmer 1000 years ago than it is today.

The reconstruction of the mean annual temperatures is based on dendrochronological, palynological and historical information, and shows the comparative chronology of climatic and historical events over a large region of Northeast Europe:

Figure 1. Map of the study region showing locations for which indirect climatic data are available.
Yellow circles indicate palynological data, green circles indicate dendrochronological data, and black circles indicate the most important historical evidence. Triangles indicate the location of long-row weather stations in and around the study region: Haparanda (1), Vardø (2), Arkhangelsk (3), Kem (4), Petrozavodsk (5), Malye Karmakuly (6), Salekhard (7), Tobolsk (8), Syktyvkar (9), Turukhansk (10), Tomsk (11), Yeniseysk (12). Source: here.

Warmer in the years 981-990 and in mid 20th century

Unlike what papers authored by scientists close to the IPCC like to suggest (a flat temperature mean over the past 1000 years followed by a 20th century hockey stick blade warming),the Russian reconstruction of decadal mean annual temperature values shows major climatic events manifested both on the scale of the entire Northern Hemisphere and in its separate regions.

Figure 4. Final reconstruction of decadal mean annual temperatures for Northeast Europe (blue line)
and instrumental data (red line). The instrumental period is enlarged in the inset. Source: here. 

According to the paper’s abstract:

In the pre-industrial era, the maximum annual mean temperatures in 981-990 were 1°C higher and minimum temperatures in 1811-1820 were 1.3°C lower than on average for 1951-1980. The constructed chronology has a noticeably larger amplitude of variability compared to hemispheric and pan-Arctic reconstructions.”

The paper concludes that the results of the reconstruction point to “major climatic events” such as the Roman Optimum, the cold epoch of the Great Migration of Peoples in the 5th and 6th centuries, the Medieval Climatic Optimum of the 10th-12th centuries, and the Little Ice Age (13th-19th centuries).

These were manifested both on the scale of the entire Northern Hemisphere, and its individual regions.

Hat-tip: inderwahrheitliegtdiekraft at X.

The Miami Herald is (Partially) Right – Python Farming Will Not Stop Climate Change

A recent article by the Miami Herald, titled “Pythons are eating the Everglades. Could eating them instead help fight climate change?” highlights some problems with a study out of Australia which proposes python farming as a solution to emissions associated with cattle farming. The Miami Herald points out major practicality issues with Python farming, but in the process misses the more important point that the shift in farming to battle climate change is unnecessary.

Made with DALL E 3

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

A recent article by the Miami Herald, titled “Pythons are eating the Everglades. Could eating them instead help fight climate change?” highlights some problems with a study out of Australia which proposes python farming as a solution to emissions associated with cattle farming. The Miami Herald points out major practicality issues with Python farming, but in the process misses the more important point that the shift in farming to battle climate change is unnecessary.

The study, published in Scientific Reports “Python farming as a flexible and efficient form of agricultural food security,” claims that python farming is well established in Asia, and offers “tangible benefits for sustainability and food systems resilience.”

The Miami Herald explains that the study authors give several reasons for how Burmese python farming is “climate friendly:”

Scientists found they are incredibly efficient at converting small amounts of food into large amounts of high-protein, low-fat weight gain. Also important, cattle burps, farts and poops are huge sources of methane, making up an estimated 45 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S. agriculture industry. Pythons poop every few days to even weeks, and if they do pass gas, it’s much, much less.

While it is true that cattle produce methane, the impact of those emissions are greatly exaggerated by climate alarmists and media acolytes. As discussed previously at Climate Realism (here, here, and here), the Environmental Protection Agency calculated the contributions of cattle related methane and found that cattle make up just 2 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. (See figure below)

Figure 1. Greenhouse gas emissions by sector in the United States. Note that beef production is less than half of the entire livestock sector, at just 2 percent. Source: Data from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Graphic by Anthony Watts. Artwork icons in graphic licensed from 123rf.com.

Methane itself also plays a very minor role in the atmosphere’s energy absorption spectrum. It has narrow absorption bands that occur at wavelengths which are already being covered by water vapor. It is also a relatively short-lived atmospheric gas, with an atmospheric lifespan of around 12 years, making it unlikely to contribute significantly to any warming effect anyway. Methane is practically irrelevant when it comes to supposed human-caused global warming, so attempting to replace cattle farming with python farming for climate purposes is a waste of time and effort at best.

Besides these errors, the Miami Herald post points out that there are serious scaling (pun intended) issues with python farming, despite the fact that it might be easier to get people to accept eating snake rather than insects, another cattle replacement popular with climate alarmists. Python farmers have to individually remove the snakes one by one from their enclosures to hand feed them, which is labor intensive and becomes increasingly difficult to accomplish with more and more snakes.

Energy efficiency aside, pythons, Miami Herald points out, don’t feed on “sustainable growth like grass,” and are exclusively carnivores, meaning some emissions will result from producing the prey used to feed the pythons, and in housing the pythons in a secure location and processing the waste.

Wild caught snake is no silver bullet either. The Miami Herald reports that some pythons caught in the Everglades “had mercury levels 100 times too high for human consumption,” and the snakes are too difficult to find in quantities that would make them a viable food source for a reasonable number of people.

Python meat is also unpalatable to most python hunters in the Everglades, not just because of the potential mercury, but also because as the Miami Herald quotes, the meat is “very chewy” but slow cooking it turns it “to slime.”

There is nothing really wrong with python farming in general, for those who like the meat, but it is not a solution to climate change. Replacing cattle farming with snake farming will have an insubstantial impact on climate change, if any at all, and it’s questionable if the labor intensity and food requirements are really carbon neutral. The Miami Herald is right to be skeptical about the future of python farming in the West.

The heat pumps scandal has gone on for too long. End subsidies now

Anyone for free money? Yes, as the Prime Minister discovered when he was offering to pay for our pub lunch under the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. But his marketing genius seems to have deserted him when it comes to the seemingly more generous offer of thousands of pounds for a heat pump.

Illustration 3d

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness/Paul Kolk

Anyone for free money? Yes, as the Prime Minister discovered when he was offering to pay for our pub lunch under the Eat Out to Help Out scheme. But his marketing genius seems to have deserted him when it comes to the seemingly more generous offer of thousands of pounds for a heat pump.

Even with an increase in the grant from £5,000 to £7,500 per installation, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme has failed to capture the imagination of the British public. In the first two years of the scheme only £127 million out of a possible £300 million of grants have been taken up. Between May 2022, when the subsidies were introduced, and December last year just 18,900 heat pumps were installed – compared with 1.5 million new gas boilers.

And no, it isn’t because the gas boiler industry has poisoned our minds with anti-heat pump propaganda, as the green lobby would have it. Rather it comes down to basic economics. A £7,500 grant doesn’t seem such a good deal when it comes in the form of a discount on something which remains fantastically expensive even after the grant is taken into account.

The justification for subsidising heat pumps was supposed to be that it would allow the industry to reach a larger scale and thus bring down costs. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. I first obtained a quote for a heat pump for my home in 2010, when it was going to cost £10,000. True, some things come down in price when they move from being a niche product to a mass market one, but it is foolish to assume that all new technologies will go this way.

Moreover, with heat pumps there is the added problem of their questionable effectiveness in older properties. Some people seem to like them, while others have splashed out many thousands still find themselves shivering in a lukewarm home.

So what exactly is the incentive for homeowners to rip out a gas boiler and replace it with a heat pump? One of the reasons you might do it is that you are concerned about climate change and want to make your own personal gesture. Is that what taxpayers are subsidising: middle class guilt? Paying £7,500 a time to help quite well off people feel better about themselves.

At least Rishi Sunak’s subsidised pub lunches ended after a month. At some point he and his colleagues are going to have to ask themselves: how much longer are we prepared to sink public money into propping up an industry whose products show little sign of being able to achieve mass appeal on their own merits? 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/15/heat-pumps-scandal-has-gone-on-for-too-long-end-subsidies

Climate Cooking:  from Roger Pielke Jr.

Pielke Jr. starts with an update on his important work in challenging flawed narratives of catastrophe.

From Watts Up With That?

Excerpts from Roger Pielke Jr.’s Substack

“How a few billionaires helped push climate science to the extremes“

Pielke Jr. starts with an update on his important work in challenging flawed narratives of catastrophe.

Happy Saturday! First, a few announcements. My paper, Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters” has passed peer-review and will soon be published in the new Nature journal npj Natural Hazards. You can read the as-accepted-draft of the paper at OSF, which I have just posted. On Tuesday at 2PM ET, I’ll be testifying at the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic at a hearing titled, “Academic Malpractice: Examining the Relationship Between Scientific Journals, the Government, and Peer Review.” Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of Science is also scheduled to testify. I’ll post my testimony and reflections following the hearing, which you can watch here.https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/climate-cooking

The rest of his post is an update to a 2020 article in Forbes.

I strongly recommend reading the piece in its entirety.

Introduction: The Genesis of a Narrative

Roger Pielke Jr.’s exposition reveals the origins and impacts of the influential RCP8.5 climate scenario, which has shaped much of contemporary climate research and policy. The narrative begins with Tom Steyer’s 2012 gathering, where leading environmental and political figures discussed strategies to make climate change a more palpable issue for the public through economic narratives.

The Billionaire’s Table and the Birth of a Strategy

At the center of the corruption of climate science discussed here sits a highly technical scenario of the future called Representation Concentration Pathway 8.5 or RCP8.5. Longtime readers of THB will no doubt be familiar with RCP8.5 and its consequences, but for anyone needing a quick primer, have a look at our short paper in Issues in Science and Technology.

Today, I add further details to this incredible story by explaining the important role in promoting RCP8.5 played by billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.

The meeting, described as a turning point, was not merely a discussion but a strategic planning session that aimed to reframe climate change as an immediate economic threat. “Steyer was focused on the question: ‘How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?’” The outcome was a targeted approach to influence public perception and policy through economic impact studies, leading to the creation of the “Risky Business” project.

According to the New York Times, in November 2012, one month after stepping down from the hedge fund he led, Steyer gathered environmental leaders and Democratic party leaders around the kitchen table at his ranch in Pescadero, California. Among those in attendance were Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and John Podesta, who had founded the Center for American Progress (CAP) in 2003 to promote progressive causes.1 Today, John Podesta serves as President Biden’s “climate envoy,” recently replacing John Kerry.

At the 2012 kitchen table meeting, Steyer was focused on the question: “How do you make climate change feel real and immediate for people?” He was convinced by attendees that the best way to answer this question was by appealing to people’s pocketbooks, through the economics of climate impacts.

Following this meeting, Steyer invited two collaborators and co-funders to join him — One was Michael Bloomberg, then a political independent who was completing 12 years as the mayor of New York. The other was Hank Paulson, a Republican who was a former CEO of Goldman Sachs and who had also served as Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush.

Each of Steyer, Bloomberg and Paulson contributed $500,000 to the initial project, which had the goal of,

“making the climate threat feel real, immediate and potentially devastating to the business world”

Risky Business and the Misuse of RCP8.5

The core of the “Risky Business” report was to project the economic implications of the most extreme emissions scenario—RCP8.5—as the most likely outcome if no action was taken. This projection was fundamentally flawed, as it misrepresented RCP8.5 as ‘business as usual’ and suggested, erroneously, that policy changes could shift us from one RCP scenario to another. Pielke critiques this approach: “Both of these methodological choices were contrary to the appropriate use of the scenarios.”

The approach focused on characterizing the extreme RCP8.5 scenario as “the closest to a business-as-usual trajectory” and centered its economic analysis on that scenario:

“we focus on RCP 8.5 as the pathway closest to a future without concerted action to reduce future warming”

By focusing on the most extreme scenario as business-as-usual they guaranteed that the economic impacts of climate change that they projected into the future would be eye-poppingly large.

But in generating large economic impacts, the authors of the Risky Business report made two significant methodological mistakes. In addition to improperly characterizing the extreme RCP 8.5 scenario as “business as usual,” they improperly presented other scenarios of the IPCC as representing different policy outcomes, suggesting that we could “move” from one scenario to another: “

Moving from RCP 8.5 to RCP 2.6 (as well as RCP 4.5 and RCP 6.0) will come at a cost”

Both of these methodological choices were contrary to the appropriate use of the scenarios, according the modeling experts who created them, and who explained at the time:

“RCP8.5 cannot be used as a no-climate-policy reference scenario [”business as usual”] for the other RCPs because RCP8.5’s socioeconomic, technology and biophysical assumptions differ from those of the other RCPs”

The scenarios are completely independent from each other, and policy cannot “move” us from one to another. Consider that RCP2.6 represents a world with 3 billion less people than RCP8.5. The Risky Business methodology ignored such critical details while promoting a simple narrative.

Propagation Through Scientific and Media Channels

Dodgy science published by climate advocacy groups is certainly not uncommon and it is usually not that interesting. But the genius of the Risky Business project was that it did not stop with a flashy report aimed at the daily news cycle. It undertook a far more sophisticated campaign focused on introducing its methods into the mainstream scientific literature, where they would take on a life of their own.

For instance, soon after the initial Risky Business report was released in 2014 the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson funded work was the basis for 11 talks at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, which is the largest annual gathering of climate researchers.

The flawed assumptions of the “Risky Business” reports did not remain confined to a single project but spread through scientific literature and the media, influencing major assessments and policy decisions. This widespread adoption was facilitated by continued advocacy and publication in prestigious journals, despite the methodological errors. “The Risky Business analyses published in the scientific literature…influenced subsequent research and served as a basis for authoritative scientific reviews,” Pielke notes.

The next step was to get the Risky Business analyses published in the scientific literature where they could influence subsequent research and serve as a basis for authoritative scientific reviews, such as the U.S. National Climate Assessment.

For instance, a 2016 paper published in the prestigious journal Science from the Risky Business project featured the erroneous notion of moving from one RCP scenario to another via policy, comparing “business as usual” (RCP 8.5) and “strongest emissions mitigation” (RCP 2.6). That paper has subsequently been cited more than 1,100 times (as of April 2024) according to Google Scholar. Despite the obvious methodological flaw, the paper passed peer review and received little or no criticism. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of papers followed similarly in adopted the same assumption of “moving” between incommensurate scenarios.

…

The 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) offers a particularly notable example. The work initiated by the Risky Business project was cited almost 200 times in that report, including direct references to the project’s reports as well as the work of its lead consultant, the Rhodium Group. One of the lead researchers for Risky Business was also a lead author of the NCA. His research, supported by Risky Business, was cited more than 150 times in the NCA. Yet, nowhere that I have seen was it disclosed by the NCA that this lead author was under contract with the Rhodium Group from 2015 to 2022.

Pielke Jr. notes the subsequent creation of the Climate Impact Lab used to inundate the media with catastrophic alarmist stories.

All of these reports are based on the misuse of scenarios, and especially RCP8.5.

The Consequences of Misguided Methodologies

The article details how the misuse of RCP8.5 has permeated scientific literature, with over 6,700 academic papers incorrectly referencing it as ‘business as usual.’ This misuse has skewed the scientific and public understanding of climate risk, magnifying perceptions of threat and urgency in ways that may not align with the most likely scenarios.

According to my search of academic citations (using Google Scholar) more than 6,700 academic papers have used “business as usual” and RCP8.5 together since 2011. If each paper is cited 15 times, that would mean that more than 100,000 papers have cited papers that mistakenly refer to RCP8.5 as “business as usual” and many of these papers improperly compare other RCP scenarios as policy options.

Further, not only did the USNCA adopted the flawed methodology of the Risky Business projects, but so too has the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most notably in its 2019 Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate. There is no doubt that climate science and policy have been profoundly influenced by the Risky Business campaign.

Of course, the Steyer-Bloomberg-Paulson investments were not entirely responsible for the misuse of scenarios in the scientific literature, but they are clearly an important part of the story.

Pielke Jr. notes the flawed (I would say ideologically corrupted) behavior of scientific institutions and media in the propagation of these exaggerated, to say the least, narratives of climate change threats.

The corruption of climate science occurred because some of our most important institutions have let us down. The scientific peer review process has failed to catch obvious methodological errors in research papers. Leading scientific assessments have ignored conflicts of interest and adopted flawed methods. The major media has been selectively incurious as to the impact of big money in climate advocacy on climate science, assessments, and policy.

Conclusion: The Imperative for Integrity in Climate Science

Pielke Jr. concludes with a call to restore integrity in climate science, highlighting the necessity of adhering to rigorous scientific standards irrespective of political or financial motivations. “We are going to need good science in the future—so it is best to keep it that way, no matter what cause it is enlisted to support,” he asserts.

Pielke Jr.’s article about RCP8.5 and the manufacturing of circular alarmist constructed narratives is not just about climate science; it’s about how science is used—or misused—to shape policy and perception. It serves as a cautionary tale of the power of narratives, the influence of money, and the critical need for vigilance in maintaining scientific standards.

Again, Pielke Jr.’s Substack is well worth a read.

Papa Pete demands we quit clinging to our cars

Remember the American love for the open road? That paean to American freedom built on the automobile but made possible by highways that also enabled trucks to deliver goods to just about any location quickly and safely?

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

Remember the American love for the open road? That paean to American freedom built on the automobile but made possible by highways that also enabled trucks to deliver goods to just about any location quickly and safely?

Hot cars are still popular today, as evidenced by the fact that the “Fast and Furious” movies have generated about $2 billion in ticket sales in the U.S. and another $5 billion worldwide. Formula 1 reported revenues of more than $3.2 billion in 2023, with profits up by 64%.

In 2021, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), which governs world motorsports, including touring, sportscar, drag racing, and rally car events, commissioned the first-ever report on the global market impact from motorsports. In the first year after the COVID pandemic, the industry generated over $200 billion in business impact on the world’s economy, directly and indirectly supporting over a million jobs.

Electric vehicles arrived concurrently with the internal combustion engine – and were quickly rejected as impractical. During their brief heyday, electric vehicles were marketed as “the ideal woman’s car,” but gasoline engines provided more energy per unit mass and could travel greater distances.

Gasoline could also be easily transported to filling stations in rural areas, many of which lacked electric power lines. Not until the 1930s did affordable electricity become available nationwide. After World War II, the gasoline-powered automobile became as popular as apple pie.

“See the USA in your Chevrolet!” and similar slogans echo the days of muscle cars and hot rods – along with convertibles and even sedans with good radios. Working people had pickup trucks, and the driver’s license was the first badge of adulthood.

Then came the minivan, now largely replaced by the sport utility vehicle. Cheap American gasoline or diesel (even with ethanol added) made even transcontinental trips possible for millions of Americans.

And then came the Progressives to spoil all the fun.

First, they hopped on the “climate emergency” bandwagon to justify massive subsidies for “clean” vehicles to “save the planet,” emphasizing no tailpipe emissions while ignoring the darker realities of cobalt and lithium mining, Chinese labor camps, or the cost of an entirely new infrastructure the private sector was not about to underwrite.

Backed by climate hype, politicians authorized massive subsidies that, to date, have gone mostly to the trendy urban rich, often purchased to show support for “green” technology and thus gain brown-nose points, but sometimes just because of the “zoom” factor.

As long as EVs were a novelty luxury item, no one really cared that the rich got a discount on their new toys. [Remember when the “toy of the month” was the Hummer?]  It may come as a surprise that Tesla did not even enter the marketplace until 2008. The EV fad also engulfed the European subsidy market in very short order.

Not satisfied with the speed of the “transition” to electric vehicles, governments began imposing mandates on manufacturers to force them to shutter long-successful product lines and switch to electric vehicles only within a very brief timeframe.

In August 2021, President Biden signed an executive order setting a national goal that, by 2030, half of all new sales must be zero-tailpipe-emissions vehicles – regardless of cost and without evidence that the buying public would, or even could, choose an EV.

The order also called on the Environmental Protection Agency to put the squeeze on manufacturers to virtually eliminate gasoline engines. And just last month, the EPA unveiled its grand scheme to force the majority of American auto buyers into EVs within the next eight years – though the final rules have a slightly slower timetable than the version proposed a year ago.

Initial reaction to the bureaucrat-written rules was mixed, as Politico reported. While President Biden gushed that he was pleasing the climate police, auto manufacturers said that “this wildly unpopular policy is going to feel and function like a ban,” noting that it comes as “Americans are struggling with high costs and inflation.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, announcing the new rules, boasted that, “We estimate that today’s rule will prevent 5.5 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide from going into our atmosphere between now and 2050.” Citing the tougher mileage standards, Papa Pete also claimed that the new rules will “save a typical American household hundreds of dollars.”

“That’s a lot of lipstick smeared on this pig,” one can imagine someone saying. In the real world, EV sales are declining across Europe such that the European Union has backed away from its lofty goals – and may have to retreat further, based on recent election results.

In the U.S., auto rental giant Hertz is selling its entire 20,000-EV fleet, citing high repair costs and weak demand. Ford lost $4.7 billion in its EV division last year and has slowed or stopped production of its EV Lightning pickup.

The Biden-Buttigieg EV mandates are already taking away factory jobs and threatening to devastate motorsports (even though there is a burgeoning Formula E racing circuit).

Yet Buttigieg could not wait to insult the vast majority of Americans who have expressed little or no desire to trade in reliable gasoline-powered vehicles for an electric vehicle – for many of the same reasons Americans rejected them a century ago.

Many of the scarce EV charging stations rely on diesel or natural gas generators or even coal-fired power plants, only adding to the perceived absurdity of forcibly imposing an unwanted technology on an already financially stressed populace.

But Papa Pete, fresh from admitting the collapse of a bridge he once deemed “racist” was “unimaginable” (proving his incompetence),  had no problem mocking Americans who willingly abandoned landlines yet “cling” to their “old-fashioned” [our words] “gas guzzlers.”This unthinking knee-jerk spirit, which permeates Western officialdom, is sparking citizen revolts against a bloated ruling class that evokes memories of a French monarch whose response to the cries of those her policies made poor was “Let ‘em eat cake” – when they had no bread.

And, while landline phones may seem old-fashioned, they still offer a level of reliability and voice quality unmatched by cell phones. There just are not enough cell phone towers (sound familiar?) to ensure 24/7/365 reliable service in every community.

One more thing. Papa Pete should know that cell phones first appeared in 1973 and only became popular two decades later, but not until the arrival of the iPhone in 2007 did people begin to ditch their landlines rather than pay for both technologies at the same time. That voluntary timetable is a lot longer than the one Buttigieg and his masters are forcing upon Americans.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Energy

Climate Fact-Check March 2024 Edition

As always, average global temperature is not a physical concept. It is merely a notion invented to push the global warming agenda. We mention it merely because it is what the excitement is all about. More on this at the end of this month’s fact checks.

xr:d:DAFWEDZSQlw:37,j:1760205910235873525,t:24040919

From ClimateRealism

By Steve Milloy

Guest Post by: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, The Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, and the International Climate Science Coalition, and Truth in Energy and Climate.

Editor’s note: This summary serves as a fact check on the biggest false claims made in the media in March, 2024. 

According to NASA satellite data, the planet remained in the grip of the naturally-caused warming during a waning El Niño phenomenon in March:

In contrast, the real-time surface station temperature measurements from Temperature.global report that temperature remained cooler than at the height of the prior El Niño during 2015-2016.

As always, average global temperature is not a physical concept. It is merely a notion invented to push the global warming agenda. We mention it merely because it is what the excitement is all about. More on this at the end of this month’s fact checks.

Links: The Washington Post, Arctic sea ice extent.
Links: Minnesota Public Radio report, Associated Press report.
Links: The Weather Channel report, The Washington Post article.
Links: The New York Times op-ed, Anthropocene New York Times post.
Links: January 2024 study, Read more.
Links: The Washington Post article, UHI effect in Washington, D.C.
Links: CBS article.
Links: The Washington Post article, Army Corps of Engineers report, NASA report, Greenland ice loss.
Links: Reuters article, previous Climate Fact Checks.
Links: CNN article, February Climate Fact Check.

We’ll close out this month with an interesting commentary in Nature magazine from NASA’s chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt.

Schmidt acknowledges that emissions-based climate models don’t explain the apparent ongoing warming that started in July 2023. Recall that we’ve been told since the 1990s that climate science is “settled.” That doesn’t seem so, now does it?

Don’t miss these other great fact checks and articles from March. Until next month…

ClimateRealism.com

WattsUpWithThat.com

See you in May for the April Climate Fact Check!

Originally published at Junkscience.com, republished with permission.

Net Zero? Fossil Fuels Are Leaving Us Before We Leave Them

Most of China’s coal production is from underground mines with mining cost increasing with depth. It is said that the average depth of Chinese underground coal mines is increasing by 10 to 25 metres per annum. The average dip of coal seams mined is 13˚.

From Watts Up With That?

David Archibald

In a paper authored by Chinese academics in 2017, there was this graph of their best estimate of the trajectory of Chinese coal production:

Figure 1: Projection of Chinese coal production to 2100.

Their best guess of the year of the production peak was 2024, which is now. There is no plateau; production tips over into a decline rate that settles down at 75 million tonnes per year and starts bottoming out late in the century. There is some support for this prediction in that Chinese coal imports have started rising strongly in the last few years. To fill their production contracts in 2024, Chinese coal mines are tending to wash their coal less, producing the contract tonnage but with a lower calorific value.

Most of China’s coal production is from underground mines with mining cost increasing with depth. It is said that the average depth of Chinese underground coal mines is increasing by 10 to 25 metres per annum. The average dip of coal seams mined is 13˚. There is indirect support for the view that at least half of China’s coal endowment has been mined from this graphic from a 2023 paper:

Figure 2: Chinese coal reserves distribution by depth

The figure is representational in that shows about 800 billion tonnes have been mined so far above 600 metres mine depth while total Chinese coal production to date is more likely to be 130 billion tonnes. What can be interpreted from it is that some 80% of coal reserves above 600 metres mine depth have already been mined and 60% of the coal between 600 metres and 1,000 metres depth. The remainder of China’s original coal endowment is much deeper and therefore will be more expensive to mine.

China’s industrial expansion was powered initially by its cheap labour followed by cheap energy. That phase is over with China’s power price for industry now rising. One consequence of that is that the cost of renewable energy, solar panels and wind turbines, will go up as their production costs rise with the Chinese coal price. China’s coal consumption is the energy equivalent of 50 million barrels of oil per day.

While China’s annual coal production increases were galloping along, there was another energy boom 15,000 km to the east which also had geopolitical consequences – the US tight oil boom. This is peaking at the same time as China’s coal production:

Figure 3: US Oil and Gas Production and Chinese Coal Production on an oil equivalent basis, 1900 – 2060.

Most projections of US tight oil production having it plateauing for a number of years before it goes into decline. It seems that the idea that will be an abrupt change in direction is too uncomfortable for people to process. But when there is unconstrained production of a profitable commodity in a large market the profile is usually symmetrical around a pronounced peak. The prime example of that is the UK which has now exhausted its fossil fuel endowment with production peaks 90 years apart:

Figure 4: UK Coal and Oil Production 1853 – 2021

It is not commonly appreciated that US gas production, tight and conventional, is the energy equivalent of 18 million barrels per day of oil, some 50% more than US oil production. The decline forecast for the US is 1.7 million barrels per day equivalent and China’s decline will be at about half that rate but go on four times longer. The US has its coal endowment to fall back on while the only alternative available to China is nuclear. China could import more coal but there isn’t that much that is readily available to be developed.

So then the question is how much nuclear is needed for China to keep the lights on? The coal to uranium equivalence is:

1 million tonnes per annum coal = 78.6 MW = 15.7 tonnes of natural uranium

So, if the projected annual Chinese coal production decline of 75 million tonnes was wholly replaced by nuclear, that would increase demand of uranium metal by 1,179 tonnes each year. This would increase world demand for uranium from its current level by about 20% every ten years.

How fast can the nuclear rollout proceed? That is shown by what happened two generations ago in France:

Figure 5: Electricity production by source, France 1960 to 2015

Nuclear’s share of power generation in France went from 10% to 70% over ten years.

We are going to Net Zero whether we like it or not – because the biggest sources of supply growth over the last 20 years have tipped over into steep decline. Fossil fuels are leaving us before we leave them. Much pain and suffering follows.

David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia