Day: July 8, 2024

Pretty Birds

Warning: This is about birds. If you are only interested in the Climate Wars, you might just go on to something else here at WUWT. I do mention that these two species of birds are not threatened by climate change.

American Kestrel

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Kip Hansen

Warning:  This is about birds.  If you are only interested in the Climate Wars, you might just go on to something else here at WUWT.  I do mention that these two species of birds are not threatened by climate change.

It has long been the case that humans have sought after pretty birds – for their physical beauty, their songs, their feathers, or their eggs.  We have made them into pets, museum displays, clothing, and hats as well as breeding some birds for profit (aviculture) and others, poultry, for both food and eggs.   

The prettier the birds are the more we have killed them or imprisoned them.  Some species have been lucky – they can be captive bred relatively easily, like canaries and parakeets and many smaller parrots, thus wild populations have been spared. Others won’t breed in captivity.  Some are protected under national and international law, some aren’t.

The Painted Bunting  is truly beautiful and much sought after, as a “sighting”, among bird watchers.  I don’t get them at my bird feeder as I am too far north.  I do get a close cousin, rarely, the Indigo Bunting which are startlingly blue, the color of the Painted’s head.   

Unfortunately, “Painted Buntings are not “easy” breeders, but a compatible pair that does reproduce will usually be quite consistent.  Males are absolutely intolerant of each other – fights between free-living individuals occasionally result in fatalities. … A large, well-planted aviary situated in a quiet location is common to all successful breeders, and a steady supply of live or canned insects is necessary if the young are to be reared successfully.”  They are protected and not legal to capture or sell as pets in the United States.

The magnificent Painted Bunting is the subject of a news story:  Gorgeous and Elusive, Painted Buntings Are Flitting Across Texas –More painted buntings flock to Texas than any other state—but these jewel-toned beauties are increasingly at risk.  The piece appears in the Texas Monthly (access available by entering any email address).

This is a pretty bird – and a song bird with a pleasant sound [more here]. And, like pretty parrots and canaries, they are captured (in Latin America) and sold in the local and international pet trade.  That is the price of beauty. 

The story, authored by Amy Weaver Dorning, is a long narrative journalism piece about  “secret mission” into the Lewisville Lake Environmental Learning Area  [LLELA] with a research group from the University of North Texas [UNT], under the direction of Jim Bednarz, a professor of biology and an avian ecologist.   Dorning accompanied a group of students on one of their many trips in the LLELA to capture, band, and measure Painted Buntings as part of ongoing multi-year  research project on the birds.   The university’s report on the project mentions, in passing, that the Buntings “been experiencing a population decline over the past several decades.”

The Dorning article is well-worth reading if you are interested in birds and how research on them might be done:  capturing, banding and attaching nano-transmitters to track them.  Characteristics of nesting areas are recorded and compared to nest-free areas.

What about the “population decline”?  Don’t know – no data from   UNT, but there is data from the IUCN Red List people: 

Least Concern:  Population Trend, Stable; Number of Mature Individuals, 14 million. Although previously listed as Near Threatened, the most current assessment (2018) upgraded the species to Least Concern with the following justification:

“Justification

This species has an extremely large range, and hence does not approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the range size criterion ….. The population size is extremely large, and hence does not approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the population size criterion ….. The population trend appears to be stable, and hence the species does not approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the population trend criterion …. Therefore, it is now assessed as Least Concern.” [https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/22723957/131475071#assessment-information, Assessment Information in detail”

No fault falls on Dorning for stating:  “…painted bunting is now listed by the American Bird Conservancy [ABC] as a species of concern”.  [I wasn’t able to confirm that listing at the ABC site – kh]  Dorning may have heard or read that somewhere.  But, the IUCN Red List is considered authoritative on these matters and considers the population stable, not declining (though it may well be declining in Texas at the LLELA).  But there is hardly any excuse for her parroting:  “Painted buntings may need all the good PR they can get, especially as climate change poses a growing threat. In late May, tornadoes and accompanying storms in North Texas wreaked havoc at the Lewisville research site.”   Tornadoes and storms are weather, not climate change, as we know, and as Dorning should know. Not even the climate-change- enthusiastic IUCN Red List thinks Painted Buntings are threatened by climate change.    Oddly, she contradicts herself quoting two of the project leaders: “But there are bright spots. Gage says that the birds who lost nests have already most likely started new ones, and Bednarz points out that the extra rain means that there will be a bigger insect population this summer, which translates to more food for the birds, stronger embryos, and more bugs to feed their nestlings. “It’ll all come back,” he says. “Sometimes disruption can be good.”   Kudos for that at least.

While we are covering bird stories by Amy Weaver Dorning, we can find the same little fault creeping in to her other fairly recent bird/birding story:  “Kestrels Are Disappearing. Here’s Where to See These “Small but Fierce” Falcons in Texas”.   Kestrels are one of my favorite raptors – the Merlin taking first place.   Both of these small raptors are about 9 to 12 in (20 to 30 cm) measured head to tail, a little larger than robin but smaller than a crow.  The Kestrel is colorful and often seen perched on telephone wires, wagging its tail up and down (not sideways). 

“American Kestrels eat mostly insects and other invertebrates, as well as small rodents and birds. Common foods include grasshoppers, cicadas, beetles, and dragonflies; scorpions and spiders; butterflies and moths; voles, mice, shrews, bats, and small songbirds. American Kestrels also sometimes eat small snakes, lizards, and frogs. And some people have reported seeing American Kestrels take larger prey, including red squirrels and Northern Flickers.” [ source ]

Dorning again spoils a well-written piece about birds with a silly claim (as in the headline above):  “But this petite raptor is also experiencing an alarming population decline across the continent, for reasons scientists haven’t been able to figure out.”

Not according to the IUCN Red List:

On the other hand, Cornell Lab of Ornithology does say they are declining, again based on the “the North American Breeding Bird Survey. Partners in Flight estimates the global breeding population at 9.2 million and rates them 10 out of 20 on the Continental Concern Score, indicating a species of relatively low conservation concern.” [ source ]

I have mentioned before that “counting birds” is a difficult and rather un-scientific enterprise – but not from lack of trying – there is just no easy and dependable way of counting birds, unless, like penguins, they regularly return to the same locations, en masse, year after year (even counting penguins is hard, they can be tricky and sometimes just move to another site).

Bottom Lines:

Birds are interesting even when not especially pretty. There are probably fewer of them now than when North America began to be colonized by Europeans in the 16th century – simply because we humans have caused a lot of land use change.

Most birds are doing just fine — particularly when people quit killing them, as we did (and still do, illegally) with most of the raptors.

There are, of course, always winners and losers according to the laws of nature. Reference: Spotted Owls vs. Barred Owls.

Absolute bottom line: Leave the birds alone and keep your pet cats indoors (or at least confined to your own property).

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

I like birds. Really.

Last week I witnessed 15 or so “little brown birds” (sparrows, finches, etc) mobbing a corn snake in my yard. If the birds had been bigger (crows, ravens, back birds) it would have been reminiscent of The Birds. I like snakes too, so I shooed the birds away long enough for the corn snake to make its way safely into the underbrush. On corn snakes, the Wiki and Herpetology sites will tell you the range of the corn snake only extends to the north as far as New Jersey. This is not true, I have found them quite common in farmyards all the way up north along the Mohawk River (Erie Canal) at the southern edge of the Adirondack Mountains in New York State.

I know that many readers don’t like the idea of keeping their cats inside but they are pets and are better off when you do so. Give them an outdoor pen if you like, fenced in all around and on top.

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #

Beware how government-sponsored media reports cherry-picked hurricane extremes to push a climate crisis.

As my local KQED now ignorantly pushes, hurricane Beryl became more dangerous due to climate change. KQED is one of a thousand-plus stations supported by your tax money via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB receives federal funding from Congress and distributes the vast majority of funds to more than 1,500 locally managed public radio and television stations across the United States. They all broadcast the same bogus analyses that climate change makes hurricanes more deadly.

By Jim Steele

As my local KQED now ignorantly pushes, hurricane Beryl became more dangerous due to climate change. KQED is one of a thousand-plus stations supported by your tax money via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB receives federal funding from Congress and distributes the vast majority of funds to more than 1,500 locally managed public radio and television stations across the United States. They all broadcast the same bogus analyses that climate change makes hurricanes more deadly. Disturbingly those stations never report all the natural dynamics that make hurricanes more intense.

Rapid hurricane intensification has been observed for over a century. The director of the National Weather Service has reported, “Every Category 5 hurricane that hit this country in the last 100 years had only been a tropical storm 3 days [earlier].” So, what supplies that added energy to intensify those hurricanes?

Hurricanes intensify due to 1) warmer Sea Surface Temperatures (SST) 2) changes in wind shear, and 3) changes in barrier layer thickness. Sadly, barrier layer thickness is typically ignored but the most important. As reported in the article, “Why Hurricanes Intensify!”, a key to hurricane intensification is the location and thickness of ocean barrier layers.

https://x.com/JimSteeleSkepti/status/1808241072013037575…

Unfortunately, the media prefers to simply blame CO2 warming for intensification. However as observations reveal, the SST warming in the northern Atlantic has been driven by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) , which causes more warming in the north Atlantic but cooling in the south Atlantic. In contrast to claims that global warming is increasing the frequency and intensity of global hurricanes, observations show hurricane intensification is a function of regional dynamics. The southern Atlantic has rarely experienced a single hurricane during the satellite era. In contrast, the greatest occurrence of strong hurricanes has happened over the western Pacific Warm Pool.

Despite false hype that climate change is intensifying global hurricanes, for the first time in the satellite era (1966-onwards), the entire North Pacific (e.g., western North Pacific, central North Pacific, eastern North Pacific) has had no named storm (e.g., tropical storm or #hurricane) activity from June 1 – July 3.

According to the IPCC, the decade with the most Category 5 hurricanes is 2000–2009, with eight Category 5 hurricanes having occurred: Isabel (2003), Ivan (2004), Emily (2005), Katrina (2005), Rita (2005), Wilma (2005), Dean (2007), and Felix (2007). The previous decades with the most Category 5 hurricanes were the 1930s and 1960s, with six occurring between 1930 and 1939.

IPCC

https://ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/…

As the IPCC states, identifying past trends in TC [Tropical Cyclones] metrics remains a challenge due to the heterogeneous character of the historical instrumental data, which are known as ‘best-track’ data (Schreck et al., 2014). There is low confidence in most reported long-term (multi-decadal to centennial) trends in TC frequency- or intensity-based metrics due to changes in the technology used to collect the best-track data.

A subset of the best-track data corresponding to hurricanes that have directly impacted the USA since 1900 is considered to be reliable, and that shows no trend in the frequency of USA landfall events(Knutson et al., 2019).

A similarly reliable subset of the data representing TC landfall frequency over Australia shows a decreasing trend in Eastern Australia since the 1800s (Callaghan and Power, 2011), as well as in other parts of Australia since 1982 (Chand et al., 2019; Knutson et al., 2019). A paleoclimate proxy reconstruction shows that recent levels of TC interactions along parts of the Australian coastline are the lowest in the past 550–1500 years (Haig et al., 2014).

The ACE index integrates all the cyclone energy and the ACE index shows no trend driven by globa warming

Global warming has nothing to do with changes in hurricanes!

The Two Most Turbulent Airports in the U.S.

Many folks are flying this summer and most are not fans of in-air turbulence.

So which airports are most prone to turbulence and why?

And if you are flying to one of these destinations, how can you minimize the risk of a bumpy flight?

From The Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Cliff Mass

Many folks are flying this summer and most are not fans of in-air turbulence.

So which airports are most prone to turbulence and why?    

And if you are flying to one of these destinations, how can you minimize the risk of a bumpy flight?

All will be revealed in this blog.

Recently, the aircraft turbulence website, Turbli, published its analysis of the most turbulent airports in North America (see results below).  The top two are Portland and Denver.

I can certainly confirm the results for Denver, to which I fly all the time (the National Center of Atmospheric Research, NCAR, is in nearby Boulder).

So why are landings and take-offs so turbulent for these locations?   

It is all about geography and nearby terrain barriers.

Portland

As shown in the map below, Portland Airport (PDX) is essentially due west of the Columbia River Gorge.

During winter, cold air and high-pressure build to the east of the Cascades, while low centers approach from the west.   The result is a strong pressure difference across the Cascades that produces strong low-level easterly winds in the Gorge that reach the airport (see model simulation below).

While the winds are strong and from the east at low levels, the winds above are generally westerly (from the west).  This produces a strong vertical wind shear (winds changing rapidly with height.

Strong wind shear is a principal driver of turbulent motions.  Summer conditions are less conducive to Portland airport turbulence.

Denver

Denver Airport (KDEN) is northwest of the city and just east of the Front Range of the Rockies (see map).

The Rockies are turbulence generators throughout the year.

During summer, and particularly from June through early September, thunderstorms develop over the Rockies during the late morning and early afternoon and then drift towards the airport.   Thunderstorms produce lots of turbulence.  

Check out his satellite picture for midday on June 23rd…you can see the cumulus clouds bubbling up on the Front Range.   Fly in from Seattle and you will fly through these clouds and will bump around considerably.

If you want to avoid summer turbulence at Denver, FLY IN or OUT EARLY before the thunderstorms rev up.  My rule of thumb:  don’t fly in or out of the DIA after 11 AM during the summer.

There are few such thunderstorms during the winter, but there still is plenty of turbulence, this time from strong mountain waves downstream (east) of the Rockies (see schematic below).   Such mountain wave turbulence is encouraged by strong westerly winds approaching the crest of the Rockies for the west, a very frequent situation during the winter!

Such mountain wave turbulence can be extreme.

Happy flying!

“It’s Nonsensical”: Greens Wail at Trump’s Hostility to Climate Action

“… he highlighted the expanding assault he and Republicans are launching against even the most obscure environmental policies – a push that’s starting to influence voters.”

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… he highlighted the expanding assault he and Republicans are launching against even the most obscure environmental policies – a push that’s starting to influence voters.”

‘It’s nonsensical’: how Trump is making climate the latest culture war

The ex-president is ranting about low water pressure and attacking mundane rules and technologies – and Republicans in Congress are now following his lead

Oliver Milman Wed 3 Jul 2024 20.00 AEST

When Donald Trump embarked upon a lengthy complaint at a recent rally about how long it takes to wash his “beautiful luxuriant hair” due to his shower’s low water pressure, he highlighted the expanding assault he and Republicans are launching against even the most obscure environmental policies – a push that’s starting to influence voters.

In his bid to return to the White House, Trump has branded Joe Biden’s attempt to advance electric cars in the US “lunacy”, claiming such vehicles do not work in the cold and that their supporters should “rot in hell”. He’s called offshore wind turbines “horrible”, falsely linking them to the death of whales, while promising to scrap incentives for both wind and electric cars.

But the former US president and convicted felon, who has openly solicited donations from oil and gas executives in order to follow industry-friendly priorities if re-elected, has also spearheaded a much broader attack on a range of mundane rules and technologies that enable water and energy efficiency.

At a June rally in Philadelphia, Trump claimed Americans are suffering from “no water in your faucets” when attempting to wash their hands or hair. “You turn on the water and it goes drip, drip,” he said. “You can’t get [the soap] off your hand. So you keep it running for about 10 times longer.” Trump complained it takes 45 minutes to wash his “beautiful luxuriant hair” and that dishwashers don’t work because “they don’t want you to have any water”.

…

But Republicans in Congress are now following Trump’s lead, introducing a flurry of recent bills in the House of Representatives targeting energy efficiency standards for home appliances. The bills – with names such as the “Liberty in Laundry Act”, “Refrigerator Freedom Act” and the ‘Clothes Dryers Reliability Act’ – follow a conservative furore over a confected, baseless claim the Biden administration was banning gas stoves, which prompted further GOP legislation.

…

A new poll, released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday, underscored this trend – support for new solar farms has slumped to 78% across all Americans, down from 90% just four years ago. Backing for expanding wind power has dropped by a similar amount, while interest in buying an electric vehicle is significantly lower than a year ago, with just 29% of people saying they would consider an EV, down from 38% in 2023.

…Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/03/trump-climate-culture-war

No wonder greens are panicking. I wonder how many Americans are realising they’ve just woken from a nightmare, that the USA their forefather’s built, a land of opportunity which rewards hard work and effort, which they thought was gone forever, is still there, just waiting for them to make the right decision on November 5th.

Cyclone Causes Increase in Coral Cover – If You Believe Their Nonsense Number

If you believe Bjorn Lomborg, we have record high coral cover and we can fix climate change. Both are nonsense propositions. In fact, this last year has been devastating for many reef ecosystems because of weather events that are part of natural climate cycles.

From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

If you believe Bjorn Lomborg, we have record high coral cover and we can fix climate change.  Both are nonsense propositions.  In fact, this last year has been devastating for many reef ecosystems because of weather events that are part of natural climate cycles.

In the central Great Barrier Reef, we had the double whammy of coral bleaching and Tropical Cyclone Kirrily.   Three reefs (Davis, Chicken and John Brewer) that were included in the recent AIMS’ Long-Term Monitoring Program surveys bore the brunt of Kirrily’s fury that hit as a severe category three before making landfall as a category one.

The basis of most Great Barrier Reef statistics is the survey.  Get that wrong and add in an extraordinary amount of hubris – the type often found amongst academics who concern themselves with climate change – and we end-up with more lying headlines.

There are some major problems with the AIMS’ LTMP as a measure of total coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef:

  1. It does not consider how the distribution and abundance of corals varies with different reef habitats,
  2. It is a perimeter survey unlikely to include habitats with higher percentage coral cover,
  3. In not surveying shallower reef habitats, including the reef crest, it cannot measure the true impacts of cyclones or bleaching.

Meanwhile, Peter Ridd has gone to some effort over the last few years to suggest that the health of the Great Barrier Reef can be reduced to a single number representing coral cover based on these LTMP perimeter surveys.

And his political interest is not actually in this number but in the trend.

Yet even after John Brewer Reef took a direct hit from Tropical Cyclone Kirrily on 25th January 2024 pummelling much of the crest clean of coral and strewing coral around the reef perimeter, the LTMP registered no significant change in coral cover at this reef.

The latest number for total coral cover at the Great Barrier Reef, as extracted and calculated first by Ridd, and following his lead by Lomborg, include recent surveys of three large reefs in the central regions of the Great Barrier Reef – Chicken, Davies and John Brewer.

Until TC Kirrily these were exceptionally beautiful reefs in warm crystal-clear waters, with the most magnificent corals – reaching their climax as ecosystems with more than 100 percent coral cover in some places.

I write more than 100 percent, because these reef crests can be of densely packed corals, competing for space and especially light; corals growing over each other with so many fishes – crowded, colourful and bustling like little metropolises on top of platforms rising from the sea floor.

Then these bustling metropolises were obliterated – by Tropical Cyclone Kirrily.  And they came to look more like Gaza.

When I visited these reefs soon after that cyclone, I found that many of the very largest of the plate and branching corals had been picked-up, turned-over and dropped-off the edge of sections of these reefs that rise from the sea floor, sometimes as platforms.  There was coral strewn about their perimeters.

Indeed, the entire wall of coral that featured in the short film I made last November about the ‘Café Latte Coral’ at John Brewer Reef that entire wall of coral has collapsed.  It has broken off from the reef crest proper and has fallen seven meters to the perimeter.

As absurd as it might seem, only now is their opportunity for these broken corals to be part of the AIMS’ surveys used by Lomborg and Ridd to claim record cover coral at the Great Barrier Reef.

The LTMP data that these academics rely on is from surveys that are only ever of the perimeter and at a depth of between 6-9 meters – where so much broken coral landed after TC Kirrily.

“Southern Australia is freezing. How can it be so cold in a warming climate?”

Our old friend Senior Lecturer in Climate Science Andrew King on why global warming is producing so much cold weather.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Our old friend Senior Lecturer in Climate Science Andrew King on why global warming is producing so much cold weather.

Southern Australia is freezing. How can it be so cold in a warming climate?

Published: July 5, 2024 2.34pm AEST
Andrew King
Senior Lecturer in Climate Science, The University of Melbourne

People living in southern Australia won’t have failed to notice how cold it is. Frosty nights and chilly days have been the weather for many of us since the start of July.

As winter continues, we are left wondering how unusual the cold is and whether we can expect several more months of this. Warmer conditions are in the forecast but winter has a long way to go. Further cold snaps could occur.

…

What’s causing the cold?

A persistent and strong high-pressure system has been hanging around over southeast Australia. The atmospheric pressure was so high it approached the Australian record of 1,044.3 hPa set on June 7 1967. An initial observation of a new record has since been disregarded, but nonetheless this is an exceptional, near-record high-pressure pattern. 

…

In winter we expect cold weather across most of Australia and occasional cold snaps that bring widespread frosty and icy conditions. However, this current cold weather is pretty unusual and we are seeing some records fall.

…

As this week shows, we still occasionally get daily cold records in the current climate. But it’s much harder to get record cold months, and record cold years at a given location are almost impossible. 

…Read more: 

https://theconversation.com/southern-australia-is-freezing-how-can-it-be-so-cold-in-a-warming-climate-233977

Bitterly cold winter high pressure systems also coincide with low wind output. There have been problems for months with Aussie wind output.

Night Time Wind Power Fails Across the Entire Continent of Australia – Watts Up With That?

May 2024 – Another wind drought pulls combined renewables output below last year

June 2024 – ‘Dark doldrums’ hits wind power supply

July 2024 – Coal power on comeback trail as wind, solar falter

Climate scientist Andrew King, who wrote the article above, thinks the answer to Australia’s future energy needs is renewables. In 2022 Andrew King channelled Greta Thunberg with a demand for a faster energy transition.

But renewables have not been a lot of help during this year of wind droughts. Not only are they subject to prolonged outages during unfavourable weather conditions, King himself admitted his own science suggests storms might get worse – which begs the question of why people who think the weather might turn nasty would even consider advocating for solutions which are profoundly vulnerable to bad weather.

Regardless of what the future holds, Australia would likely have suffered prolonged blackouts at night during recent freezing cold wind drought nights, if the real fossil fuel powered energy network hadn’t been ready to be switched on at a moment’s notice, to prop up the fake renewable system.

Maintaining two systems in parallel, the fake renewable system, and the real fossil fuel powered system, is what is driving up energy bills. It is time for Australia to choose, between a system with a proven track record of reliability, and a useless renewable system which we know will regularly let us down.

Energy notes from the edge: AI latest – the energy beast is fully unleashed; and when a Bee gets an A – an insect skill set could benefit humans in an incredible way

The energy world has been in turmoil for quite some time, though the drama has been much more pronounced over the past decade, where it has been buffeted by some enormous crosswinds. The most prominent of these was that, for the first time in history, powerful groups decided they wanted to demolish it, incredulously somehow unable to grasp the consequences. (I blame too many Marvel comic movies, which abandon the pretext of any known human ability solving a problem, and today’s youth seem to have adopted magical solutions as the ones worth holding out for, but whatever.)

From BOE Report

 By Terry Etam

More AI/data center yelling – we’d better pay attention to the energy consequences 

The energy world has been in turmoil for quite some time, though the drama has been much more pronounced over the past decade, where it has been buffeted by some enormous crosswinds. The most prominent of these was that, for the first time in history, powerful groups decided they wanted to demolish it, incredulously somehow unable to grasp the consequences. (I blame too many Marvel comic movies, which abandon the pretext of any known human ability solving a problem, and today’s youth seem to have adopted magical solutions as the ones worth holding out for, but whatever.) 

Just as everyone was getting cranked up on the energy transition, a Western imperative, political passion projects have now taken a back seat to several billion hungry people’s vision for a better future. The developing world really started flexing its muscles, not just as an exporter of cheap crap to the west but as economic entities unto themselves, and their energy consumption began to skyrocket (with many, many countries yet to really join the party – imagine, for example, how many cruise ships will ply the oceans once Africa, India, Pakistan etc. reach western income levels). Renewables spending exploded, but so did shale development, and for the past few years we’ve been locked into an uneasy but somewhat steady cycle whereby the world adds as much energy as it can in every form before 8 billion people gobble it up voraciously, and Bob’s your uncle. Not exactly boring, but we could see how things were unfolding, and how commodity prices were ensuring that the world’s supplies remained healthy, though not so high as to cause demand destruction.

Then late last year, something landed into the scene like the Tunguska Fireball. (Oh, ok…). This new something hasn’t levelled forests for 40 square miles like Tunguska did, but the impact is going to be even bigger, even if it takes a year or two for the shock waves to fan out.

The new fireball is the arrival of AI, its widespread acceptance and adoption, and the view that it is now a competitive imperative. The West is now wrestling with a new energy demand boom that reflects what the developing world is going through, though the developing world wants energy development so they can have a fridge and the West wants it so they can automate legal contracts and make fake videos. On all these fronts, thoughts of living with scarcity are unacceptable, despite the gulf in necessity.

Regardless, both the speed at which AI demand is increasing and its associated repercussions are about to get very significant.

For the last 6-9 months, as the story really developed, the AI projections were somewhat hypothetical – many companies announced plans to get heavily into AI, but we didn’t know what it would mean. There was a focus on sort of the downstream of it, how the end-use impacts were going to impact humanity. The upstream end, the energy consumption, was, in the general discourse, kind of meh – it’ll all work out. 

Well, the first energy chickens are coming home to roost. They might be AI chickens, but their feed bill is not going to be virtual.

Energy observers have been reading the endless stream of AI headlines, wondering where the energy was going to come from. Consider Amazon, which recently announced that they would be spending $100 billion over the next decade on AI data centres. And though Amazon is one of the biggest, there are hundreds of companies on the same AI-frenzied path. They all simply must jump on the train, or risk getting left behind. Almost every industrial field is joining, as are government agencies.

Many modern industrial western behemoths have pledged to facilitate their growth in a green way, which – the current rate of AI growth – is incompatible with a rapid (or any sort of) energy transition. Renewables have not been able to keep up with rising energy consumption levels before the AI wave, and these cumulative trillions in AI investment only move the goal posts farther away.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html

So AI developers are doing the logical thing, in the time frame they want their AI up and running (i.e., right now). They are going right to the energy source to build data centres. Some are building near natural gas fields (see: Ohio’s exploding AI demand, right near the massive Appalachia gas field). That’s all well and good, because new wells can be drilled to meet that demand.

But there’s some very sobering news for the country’s other power consumers. AI developers have zeroed in on, logically enough, the only true 24/7 source of emissions free energy: nuclear power. 

The Wall Street Journal just recently noted the phenomenon: “The owners of roughly a third of U.S. nuclear-power plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity to new data centers needed to meet the demands of an artificial-intelligence boom.”

Here’s Amazon Web Services in action. AWS is building the Cumulus Data Assets center, a 1,200-acre campus co-located with the 2.5 GW Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. The data center is expected to consume 960 MW, or about 40 percent of the nuclear plant’s output, reliable, baseload, clean power that will become unavailable to the grid. 

Consider that this new AWS demand arose just in the past few months, and that last year the regional grid operator PJM had the following to say in its annual report: “While electricity demand rises, more than 20% of PJM’s generators (~40GW) are at risk of retiring by 2030… As a result of this research, PJM established a new initiative Ensuring a Reliable Energy Transition where we clearly articulated our reliability concerns.”

Again, note that PJM was freaking out well before AI demand started accelerating so rapidly. 

What makes this new AI demand so concerning from a grid perspective is that demand can co-locate with power facilities, and potentially bypass the entire transmission/delivery system (if regulations allow), meaning that critical power supplies might not ever even make it to the grid. Users and generators generally prefer that scenario since it cuts out a middle participant, and the pie gets shared only two ways instead of three.

The media still seems lost in the fog as they have been for a while. Ford’s CEO gave quite an ironic talk the other week that shone a light on the inability of the mainstream to grasp the consequences. At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ford CEO Jim Farley gave a lengthy talk about EVs, and how they are the future, and the media lapped it up, with every news outlet that covered the story zeroing in on Farley’s positive view of EV growth. Leave it to wise and thoughtful independent observers to pick up the nuance: energy analyst extraordinaire Dan Tsubouchi noted Farley’s alarm midway through the talk, something no one else seemed to: “Our grid can’t handle what we have today. Are we going to build 20% more power plants to handle all these AI data centers? Or are the companies going to start to create their own power centers?  What do we feel as a society when a private company operates a private power plant?”

What makes Farley’s comments so ironic is that the central theme of his talk was about how Ford would soon be making $30,000 EVs, which would help lead to widespread adoption, which would exacerbate power shortages that he rightly observes are on the way.

It should be apparent to anyone that the grid needs all the help it can get, from any energy source. To watch those in charge make the decisions they are with respect to unrealistic goals and slogans is stomach churning to watch. Of interest to BOE Report readers, do note that natural gas is the only solution in the next 5-10 years to handle this crunch.

On a lighter note and on the other hand, if you want to see blistering competence from an unexpected source…

Bees can do what now?

Amazing news out of the bee world. I had no idea but apparently the little guys have very sensitive noses, and can smell the craziest stuff. I guess it makes sense, since they sniff out flowers for a living, but those can’t be challenging targets, with their bright colours and strong scents, but it looks like their little schnozes can do far far more.

Apparently bees have been for some time now able to sniff out bombs. The U.S. Energy Department’s Los Alamos facility researched this for 18 months, training bees in the old Pavlovian way – rewarding bomb-sniffing with sugar water. “We are very excited at the success of our research as it could have far-reaching implications for both defence and homeland security,” said a Los Alamos research scientist [his swollen head covered in welts] (I’m guessing).

That research was conducted in 2005-6, so apparently they made no headway on that project, but if they did how would we know? Would they have little sinister black uniforms?

Anyway, new research has now shown that bees can smell lung cancer on patients’ breaths. Whoa. Utterly amazing, and wonderful to hear. I hope this leads to great places… but setting all that aside one must simply ask the question: What on earth goes on in research labs? Is it like Jackass for Nerds? How on earth would anyone come up with the idea to have bees sniff people’s breath, and then test that against a random bunch of illnesses? 

I’m not mocking them, not by any means, and God bless ‘em. Reading about these developments is like the very best of science, curious minds seeking novel solutions to significant problems. No dogma, no jabbering about trusting science, nothing but new knowledge, new tools for humanity, new possibilities, all with no cost other than the enslavement of bees, which may or may not be problematic; I don’t really know how bees feel about being used in such a way. Hopefully they can get to the forefront of bee DEI without having to go through decades of drama, trauma, and having to form unions to get a safe and supportive work environment. I’m going to go buy some honey.

What the world desperately needs – energy clarity. And a few laughs. Pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity,  available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.

Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.

UHI In Phoenix

There’s the usual nonsense about climate change, but with road surface temperatures inflated by 60F, that heat has to go somewhere, and that is back up in the air.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

An exposure of just how strong the UHI effect can be:

A recent NASA map provides a stark visualization of the extreme temperatures that pavement can reach in Phoenix, Arizona, during periods of intense heat.

Contact burns from hot pavement are an often-overlooked threat during searing heat waves.

A recent NASA map showcases how hot pavement can get in Phoenix, Arizona. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) found some sidewalks and roads reaching temperatures capable of causing second-degree burns on contact.

“We create these maps to be intuitive to users and help make data more accessible to the public and citizens scientists,” said Glynn Hulley, a JPL climate researcher.

Notably, Phoenix is the fifth-most populated city in the US. The map encompassed a network of streets and walkways around the city, exposing how urban landscapes devoid of trees can become heat traps.

The map visualization mainly depicts asphalt and concrete surfaces colored by temperature (yellow, red, and purple).

These surfaces act like giant heat sponges, soaking up and radiating strong heat to dangerously high temperatures (at least 120°F/49°C). As per the NASA release, a single touch may cause burns in seconds during heat waves.

The data highlighted areas like Maryvale and Central City, with limited parks and trees, as experiencing some of the highest surface temperatures. In contrast, neighborhoods with trees, such as Encanto and Camelback East, benefited from a cooling effect.

Surprisingly, the hottest land surface temperature within Phoenix was recorded not on a street or sidewalk but at Sky Harbor International Airport, where it reached a scorching 140°F (60°C).

Climate change is pushing temperatures higher across the globe, which could worsen the hot pavement problem that plagues many cities. Due to its dark color and material composition, asphalt absorbs 95% of the sun’s radiation.

On hot days, this might easily raise roadway temperatures by 40 to 60 degrees F (22 to 33 degrees C) above the air temperature. If left unchecked, this issue could become even more severe in the future.

https://interestingengineering.com/science/skin-searing-sidewalks-us-nasa-heatmap

There’s the usual nonsense about climate change, but with road surface temperatures inflated by 60F, that heat has to go somewhere, and that is back up in the air.

And the tarmac and concrete runways at the airport gets even hotter apparently..

Phoenix’s main weather station is at the International Airport, and has been there since 1930, two years after the airport opened. It is situated about 50m from the taxiing area, marked in blue, close enough to the runways to provide accurate temperature data for the aircraft.

Critical Energy: Europe’s Voters Reject Greens’ Pro-Wind & Solar/Anti-Human Policies

Human civilisation is all about harnessing energy. Which is why the so-called ‘Green’ is hell-bent on destroying the system that provides cheap and reliable energy – be it electricity, gas, coal or oil. And they especially hate nuclear power generation. They promote hopelessly unreliable wind and solar not because they want you to have power (they don’t) but because they want to starve their countrymen of energy, and make it so unaffordable and unreliable the only an educated elite will ever be able to afford it (ie, them, not you).

From STOP THESE THINGS

Human civilisation is all about harnessing energy. Which is why the so-called ‘Green’ is hell-bent on destroying the system that provides cheap and reliable energy – be it electricity, gas, coal or oil. And they especially hate nuclear power generation. They promote hopelessly unreliable wind and solar not because they want you to have power (they don’t) but because they want to starve their countrymen of energy, and make it so unaffordable and unreliable the only an educated elite will ever be able to afford it (ie, them, not you).

At heart, these human-haters are all misery, rage and resentment. Much like their late hero, Karl Marx.

A dip into the Communist Manifesto provides a pretty clear picture of the source of that rage and resentment and their ultimate object: the abolition of private property, the destruction of the family unit, church and every other existing social institution there is – which “can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”.

In this interview with Dr Jordan Peterson – The Devil and Karl Marx – Dr Paul Kengor posits that Marx’s bitter rage and destructive resentment was laid out in his poetry and plays – where Marx gives his hero, Satan top billing – long before he reduced it all to a Manifesto aimed at wrecking everything and ruining our lives.

Strip away all the guff about ‘fairness and equity’ and you’re left with an angry, ignorant and ill-educated class who blame everyone else for their own inherent failings in life and love.

However, give them their due, by pretending to care about the environment, they’ve attracted plenty of useful idiots and beguiled plenty of voters, apparently keen to be seen doing ‘the right thing’.

Now the voters, at least, are waking up: they know they’ve been had, they’re angry and they want revenge.

Even in Germany, where the hard-left ‘Greens’ have dominated politics over the last generation or so, anti-energy (which means in reality anti-human) policy has turned politically toxic, as The Australian’s Adam Creighton outlines below.

Europe’s electoral earthquake sounds warning for Greens
The Australian
Adam Creighton
27 June 2024

It used to be said Australia was a few years behind the US and ­Europe when it came to politics. The Australian Greens Party appears to be hoping that’s still the case with the launch of its new “No coal. No Gas. No Nuclear” campaign in the wake of the Coalition’s decision to support the development of domestic nuclear power for electricity generation. I couldn’t help but fill in the next logical item in the series: “No economy”.

In the US and Europe, more people are doing the same thing, as it becomes increasingly evident that an electricity grid powered mainly by wind and solar power is a costly pipe dream.

A “greenlash” is coming, as ­voters throughout the developed world realise how duped they’ve been by years of unscientific, uneconomic nonsense spouted by much of the media and the so-called “experts”.

The marketing genius of referring to wind and solar power as “renewable”, when the associated infrastructure needs to be replaced more often than for nuclear or fossil fuel power stations, is wearing off.

The recent European parliament elections should be a wake-up call for radical climate change evangelists. In France, support for local Green parties more than halved to 5.5 per cent. In Germany, it collapsed almost 50 per cent to 12 per cent.

Among voters under 25, the German Greens did worse than the so-called “hard right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, as veteran US political analyst Ruy Teixeira pointed out last week.

“There’s no doubt concerns about immigration were key to the right populist surge in these elections, but the role of backlash against green policies should not be underestimated,” he said.

In 2019, just five years ago, the Greens did seven times better than the AfD. That’s a political earthquake if there ever was one.

“Voters really don’t want to be forced, directly or indirectly, to get an electric vehicle when they’re perfectly happy with their internal combustion car,” Teixeira added. “Rather than fighting climate change, voter’s strong preference is for cheap, reliable, abundant ­energy.”

In the US, support for nuclear energy for domestic power surged from 43 per cent in 2020 to 57 per cent in 2023 after flatlining for years, according to Pew Research, published in August last year.

The prospect of even higher energy prices at a time when prices in general have risen at least 20 per cent and house prices even more – all directly as a result of rampant money printing and stimulus during the Covid-19 pandemic – is proving politically toxic.

The Labor government’s childish anti-nuclear campaign built around three-eyed animals should be regarded as an international embarrassment. The number of nuclear reactors in the US, which provide around 20 per cent of the country’s electricity, declined from a peak of 111 in the late 1980s to 93. But as the anti-nuclear hysteria wears off, more reactors are being proposed. Now the Biden administration has embraced nuclear power as the only realistic way to provide reliable zero-carbon dioxide energy.

France, which has safely produced the bulk of its electricity via nuclear fission for years, has announced it is building at least six and up to 14 new nuclear power stations in coming years. India is building at least 18 by the early 2030s, and China is planning at least 100 new reactors by 2035.

Yes, new nuclear power stations will be expensive until the tempo of production increased and local industry climbed the learning curve. In any case, the cost argument is laughable given state and federal governments just sprayed around $400bn of borrowed money against the wall during Covid-19 for a cumulative excess deaths outcome that was scarcely different from Sweden’s, a country that spent barely anything by comparison.

As for safety, far more people tragically died at a South Korean electric battery manufacturing plant last week, at least 22, than have died from nuclear power related accidents since the poorly run and designed Chernobyl plant broke down in the 1980s.

Anyone who grew up near Sydney’s Lucas Heights reactor (as I did) knows nuclear power can be very safe. Whatever the case, transition to “net zero” by 2050 is a delusion. As eminent Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil pointed out in a recent essay, it hasn’t even started – despite all the trillions spent. “Since the world began to focus on the need to end the combustion of ­fossil fuels we have not made the slightest progress in the goal of ­absolute global decarbonisation,” he points out.

Since 1997, fossil fuel consumption in absolute terms has increased 55 per cent. Its share of the total has declined from 86 per cent to 82 per cent. “All we have managed to do halfway through the ­intended grand global energy transition is a small relative decline,” Smil writes.

For affluent nations to achieve the net-zero carbon goals outlined in the international treaties they have signed, they would have to commit to annual expenditure of at least 20 per cent of GDP, for decades. To put it in perspective this is even more than the Soviet Union spent for a few years in its existential struggle to defeat Germany in World War II.

More than 80 million kilometres of new transmission lines (equivalent of redoing the entire global grid) would need to be built by 2040, the International Energy Agency has noted.

None of this is obviously going to happen, and Australia’s policies won’t make a scintilla of difference given our tiny contribution to global carbon dioxide emission.

If the mainstream media focused more on retailing these important facts, rather than dwelling on hot days in summer, we’d have a better chance of avoiding massive economic costs for zero environmental benefit.

Adam Bandt’s Greens better hope Australia is still a few years behind the rest of the world. If Australia’s electoral dynamics come to resemble Europe’s even a little bit come the next federal election, they should be worried.
The Australian

The Nationwide 500,000 EV Charger Charade

The charade I refers to is President Biden’s $7.5 billion dollar investment to install 500,000 electric charging stations along America’s highways by 2030. A reliable and convenient public EV charging infrastructure is critical to achieve the President’s goal of meeting the recent EPA CO2 emission regulation that require nearly 72% of U.S. new light vehicle sales to be fully electric or plug-in hybrid by 2032. Without diving deeper into the announcement, one would likely assume that $7.5 billion is sufficient to construct the 500,000 charging stations, one every 50 miles along the nation’s highways.

From Watts Up With That?

By Geoffrey Pohanka

The word charade has several meanings, and including an act or event that is clearly false (Cambridge Dictionary), something done just for show (Vocabulary.com), or a situation in which people pretend that something is true when it clearly is not (Oxford Leaner’s Dictionary).

The charade I refers to is President Biden’s $7.5 billion dollar investment to install 500,000 electric charging stations along America’s highways by 2030. A reliable and convenient public EV charging infrastructure is critical to achieve the President’s goal of meeting the recent EPA CO2 emission regulation that require nearly 72% of U.S. new light vehicle sales to be fully electric or plug-in hybrid by 2032. Without diving deeper into the announcement, one would likely assume that $7.5 billion is sufficient to construct the 500,000 charging stations, one every 50 miles along the nation’s highways.

To identify the charade, one must first, look at the math: 500,000 charging stations, each with a minimum of four chargers, accomplished with an investment of $7.5 billion dollars. But that is only $15,000 per charging station, installed. A single high capacity charger can cost $100,000 or more, and most stations have multiple chargers. We are now in the second year of the program and only seven stations have been opened so far. At this rate, it will require thousands of years to build all 500,000 charging stations, assuming there are sufficient funds to do so.

Global consulting firm McKinsey and Company estimates that the U.S. will need 28 million charging ports by 2030. There are just two million charging ports today. To meet the goal, about 12,000 new public and private charging ports will need to be added every single day to reach the goal by 2030. 

It is true that significantly more government funded charging stations are in the works and will be opened. The stations completed so far cost significantly more than what has been promised. With retailers contributing land to the projects opened so far, the cost of each station has averaged one-million dollars, with the government participation of 80% of the cost. Eight-hundred-thousand dollars for each station is significantly more than the 15,000 committed by the administration. At this rate, the 500,000 charging stations will cost the government $400 billion, not the $7.5 billion the President has promised.

If the administration is so wrong with this program, one must consider how many government programs designed to bring electric vehicles to the masses are similarly defective.

Geoffrey Pohanka, Chairman, Pohanka Automotive Group

Capitol Heights MD

(p.s. I own two EVs, like them, and they are my daily ride)

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.