Day: July 11, 2024

Implications of the Linear Carbon Sink Model

An important consequence of the linear sink model needs to be mentioned. When we look again at Figure 1 we clearly see that the large short term variability of the concentration growth is reflected in the sink effect. This variability is removed in the sink model, without changing the trend of the data. Therefore, the reconstructed concentration growth also does not exhibit its original short-term variability; its only “noise” is caused by the anthropogenic emission data.

From Climate Etc.

by Joachim Dengler

This post is the first of two extracts from the paper Improvements and Extension of the Linear Carbon Sink Model.

Introduction – Modelling the Carbon Cycle of the Atmosphere

When a complex system is analyzed, there are two possible approaches. The bottom-up approach investigates the individual components, studies their behavior, creates models of these components, and puts them together, in order to simulate the complex system. The top-down approach looks at the complex system as a whole and studies the way that the system responds to external signals, in the hope to find known patterns that allow conclusions to be drawn about the inner structure.

The relation between anthropogenic carbon emissions, CO2 concentration, and the carbon cycle has in the past mainly been investigated with the bottom-up approach. The focus of interest are carbon sinks, the processes that reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration considerably below the level that would have been reached, if all CO2 remained in the atmosphere. There are three types of sinks that absorb CO2 from the atmosphere: physical oceanic absorption, the photosynthesis of land plants, and the photosynthesis of phytoplankton in the oceans. Although the mechanisms of carbon uptake are well understood in principle, there are model assumptions that cause divergent results.

The traditional bottom-up approaches are typically box-models, where the atmosphere, the top layer of the ocean (the mixed layer), the deep ocean, and land vegetation are considered to be boxes of certain sizes and carbon exchange rates between them. These models contain lots of parameters, which characterize the sizes of the boxes and the exchange rate between them. The currently favored model is the Bern box diffusion model, where the deep ocean only communicates by a diffusion process with the mixed layer, slowing down the downwelling carbon sink rate so much, that according to the model 20% of all anthropogenic emissions remain in the atmosphere for more than 1000 years.  

I challenge this claim by questioning some of these assumptions. How does the Bern Model explain the high yearly absorption rate of more than 6% of the 14C from the bomb tests for 30 years after 1963? How does a downwelling diffusion model work, when the CO2 concentration in the deep ocean is higher than in the top layer? Empirically there is evidence that ocean absorption is still increasing and there is no sign of saturation.

The top-down models in contrast do not typically look at the details of the sink mechanism. On the basis of mass conservation, they measure the actual empirical sink rate as the difference between anthropogenic emissions and the CO2 concentration growth in the atmosphere, and investigate how this empirical sink rate is related to CO2 concentration. This is justified with the assumption that all contributing sink effects can be approximated with sufficient accuracy by linear functions of CO2 concentration.

The  Linear Carbon Sink Model

Atmospheric concentration growth is the difference between all emissions and all absorptions – this is the carbon mass balance described by the continuity equation. Emissions are split between known anthropogenic emissions and unknown natural emissions.  For simplification, the relatively unknown emissions caused by land use change are included in the unknown natural emissions. This is justified on the basis that the measurement error of land use change emissions is very large anyways, and by transferring a badly known contribution to the unknown contributions, we do not lose important information.  

Obviously emissions, absorptions, and concentration must be measured using the same unit. The natural unit for evaluating mass conservation would be Pg (petagram), but atmospheric masses are usually measured as concentration, relative to the total mass of the atmosphere. For emissions and absorption, their masses translate into potential concentration change. Therefore, ppm is used here consequently, where 1 ppm (parts per million) is equivalent to 2.12 PgC (Petagram Carbon).

The difference between the unknown absorptions and the unknown natural emissions is defined as the sink effect during the time interval of typically a year, implying tacitly that the annual net absorptions are larger than the annual net natural emissions.  On the other hand, the same sink effect is known from measurements of anthropogenic emissions minus the concentration growth. Together both statements are equivalent to the continuity equation, where annual concentration growth equals all (anthropogenic and natural) annual emissions minus all annual absorptions.   This is displayed in Figure 1. The sink effect is modelled linearly with a constant absorption coefficient a expressing the proportionality of the absorptions to CO2 concentration and a constant n representing the annual natural emissions

Figure 1. The measured yearly sampled time series of anthropogenic emissions and yearly CO2 concentration growth. Both effects are measured in or have been converted to ppm, in order to guarantee comparability. Their difference is the growing carbon sink effect.

The estimated parameters of the least squares fit with annual data from 1959 to 2023 are a=0.0183, n=5.2 ppm.  The equilibrium concentration which is reached when anthropogenic emissions are assumed to be zero, is C0= n/a = 284 ppm.

When reconstructing or predicting modelled CO2 concentrations, it is carried out by calculating the concentration growth from the mass balance equation and recursively reconstructing the concentration from emissions (equation (6) in the paper). 

Figure 2 shows the comparison of the actual measured CO2 concentration with the predicted concentration data 2000–2020, using only data from 1950–1999 for the estimation of the model parameters. This shows the high quality of the prediction based on the linear model, using only data before the prediction time interval for estimating the model parameters. The 95% confidence interval of the prediction error, displayed as the grey shaded area, is extremely small, the actual deviations are much smaller still.

Figure 2. Model estimation with measured data from 1950–1999. The prediction of CO2 concentration is done by using the real emission data and the model. The grey error bar shows the estimated 95% confidence interval based on error propagation of the modelling residual error variance. Direct prediction comparison is possible due to the availability of the actual concentration data from 2000–2020.

Another way of getting a sense for the quality of a model is to compare the model reconstruction with the original data within the range, from which the model was built.  Figure 3 displays the comparison of the actual CO2 concentration data with their model reconstruction based on the linear model over the whole time range from 1959 to 2023. Surprisingly, the actual concentration is a bit smaller than the one predicted by the model. This suggests that in the near future no saturation of the sink effect is to be expected.

Figure 3. The measured CO2 concentration (in ppm) is compared with the concentration reconstruction based on the linear model. The parameters of the model are estimated from emission and concentration data of the whole time range from 1959–2023.

Identifying the Inflection Point in the CO2 Concentration

An important consequence of the linear sink model needs to be mentioned. When we look again at Figure 1 we clearly see that the large short term variability of the concentration growth is reflected in the sink effect. This variability is removed in the sink model, without changing the trend of the data. Therefore, the reconstructed concentration growth also does not exhibit its original short-term variability; its only “noise” is caused by the anthropogenic emission data.

From a recent publication of the CarbonBrief Project, we know that global emission data have been constant for more than 10 years. For constant emissions the linear sink model implies declining concentration growth, due to increasing sink effect while concentration increases. Figure 4 shows that the measured yearly concentration growth data have an absolute maximum in 2016 and a declining trend afterward. But the concentration growth data, when stripped of short-term effects by means on the linear sink model, have their maximum already in 2013 and are declining since then. This means that the concentration graph has an inflection point in 2013, turning from concave to convex behavior. The effect appears even clearer when emission data are also smoothed. This is a remarkable validation of a model prediction — the fact that atmospheric carbon concentration growth is declining since 2013 has not been published before.

Figure 4. Comparison of the measured atmospheric CO2 concentration growth (in ppm) with the reconstruction of concentration growth by means of the linear sink model from both the original anthropogenic emission data as well as the smoothed anthropogenic emission data.

Figure 4 also explains why the significant Covid-19 related drop in anthropogenic emissions in 2020 did not have any visible effect on concentration growth. The reconstructed “noise-free” concentration growth clearly reflects the drop in emissions. But it so happened that this coincided with a positive spike in the “random” component of the concentration growth originating from natural emissions.

Making Land Use Change Emissions Consistent

When comparing the ex-post prediction in Figure 5 of 2000–2020 concentrations using the linear model with data from 1950–1999, where emissions caused by land use change were included (copied from the previous post), with the new prediction in Figure 2  without explicit land use change emissions, it is obvious that the predictive quality has become considerably better when discarding explicit land use change emission data for estimating the model parameters.

Figure 5. Prediction of 2000–2020 concentration with data from 1950–1999 from previous post. Emissions caused by land use change had been included as anthropogenic emissions. This graph is included for comparison with the better prediction in Figure 2, which does not explicitly include emissions from land use change. The grey area represents the 95% confidence interval of the predicted data.

This does not mean that there are no land use change emissions; it rather means that the best assumption is that they have been constant between 1950 and 2000 and beyond. It is a direct consequence that constant annual land use change emissions are interchangeable with natural emissions, and we are free to interpret a part of the measured natural emissions as land use change emissions. 

The most likely annual value of the land use change emissions during this specific time interval can be inferred from the assumption about the equilibrium CO2 concentration by postulating an equilibrium concentration value without land use change emissions, and let land use change account for the difference to the actually measured equilibrium concentration. This obviously assumes that the ocean and land sink mechanisms have remained rather stable over the time of observation.

Let’s postulate that the “real” equilibrium CO2 concentration value should be the same as the preindustrial assumed value of 280 ppm. The estimate of the equilibrium based on anthropogenic emissions is 𝐶0=284 ppm.  Therefore, we can infer that between 1950 and 2020 the most likely annual value of the Land Use Change emissions LUC is

𝐿𝑈𝐶=((284ppm−280ppm)*0.0183)*2.12 PgC/ppm = 0.15 PgC

The measured data constrain the possible range of the land use change emissions. Increasing their assumed value implies lowering the equilibrium CO2 concentration. With the most likely equilibrium concentration of 280 ppm the best estimate for land use change emissions, they are 0.15 PgC per annum. Obviously changing the assumption of the “real” natural equilibrium value to e.g. 270 ppm, would consequently change the inferred Land Use Change emissions to 0.54 PgC.

The postulated value of land use change emissions may contradict the state-of-the-art literature, depending on the value of the assumed equilibrium concentration. I see, however, no other possibility to reconcile the four constraints of anthropogenic emission measurements, concentration growth measurements, consistent sink coefficient, and equilibrium concentration consistent with preindustrial value of 280 ppm. The satisfied consistency of these constraints is reflected in the quality of prediction, as shown with the ex-post prediction of the 2000–2020 concentration data in Figure 2. 

Future Emission Scenarios

To make predictions, assumptions about future CO2 emissions have to be made. Obviously, the standard scenarios of IPCC AR6 are a possible first choice. They have, however, severe handicaps. Originating from the time of exponential emission growth, at least 2 IPCC scenarios (SSP5-8.5 named “Avoid at all costs” and SSP3-7 named “Dangerous”) are so far from reality and even from the availability of fossil fuel resources that it is not meaningful to discuss them. For more than the last 10 years, global emissions have been constant within the range of measurement error. This knowledge is not yet reflected adequately in official emission statistics of the International Energy Agency, but also in these statistics there are no significant global emission changes since 2018.

Therefore, approximately constant emissions are to be considered as the worst-case scenario in the real world. This is slightly above the IPCC scenario SSP2-4.5 named “Middle of the road” during the second half of this century.

At the other end of the scale, the IPCC scenario SSP1-1.9 named “Most optimistic” is equally in denial of reality, because it assumes global emissions will to be cut to zero by 2050. None of the large countries that dominate global emissions has any plans to reduce emissions to zero. Also, SSP1-2.6 named “Next best”, with zero emissions after 2050, ignores industrial transition times, even if there was the political will. Both these scenarios also ignore the stabilizing effect of natural carbon sinks on CO2 concentration, which is the key message of this post.

Therefore, I want to focus on four scenarios, displayed in Figure 6, which are less restrictive than SSP1-2.6. First, the mentioned worst-case reference scenario with constant future emissions, extrapolating the recent 5 years.

Figure 6. Historical CO2 emissions until 2022 and from 2023 emission scenarios 0%, 0.3%, 1%, and 2% annual emission reductions.

Then, the IEA “Stated Policies” scenario, which is the most likely future emission scenario according to extensive research about existing policy decisions, approximately reducing worldwide carbon emission by 0.3% per annum, strictly speaking after 2040. This, in fact, corresponds closely to the IPCC SSP2-4.5 emission scenario.

A more severe emission reduction scenario would be 1% per annum, reducing worldwide emissions by 50% every 70 years, and finally the most aggressive reduction scenario with 2% reduction per annum, reducing emissions by 50% every 35 years. This comes close to the SSP1-2.6 “Next best” scenario without reducing to zero completely.

The predictions based on the discussed linear carbon sink model for all four scenarios are shown in Figure 7. With the linear carbon sink model, all four emission scenarios will not raise the CO2 concentration beyond 520 ppm, and the three emission reduction scenarios will reach the peak concentration within this century. I do not draw conclusions about consequences for global temperature here, because the difficult question of climate sensitivity is clearly beyond the scope of this post.

Figure 7. Historical CO2 concentration time series until 2022 and from 2023 concentration prediction scenario from linear carbon sink model with 0%, 0.3%, 1%, and 2% annual emission reductions.

For future historians, I include Figure 8, in order to be able to compare the same scenarios with the CO2 concentration predictions after 2022 from the Bern model of the 2013 publication. The IPCC predictions are based on similar models to the Bern model, with comparable outcomes.

Figure 8. Historical CO2 concentration time series, measured in ppm, until 2022 and from 2023 concentration prediction scenario from Bern model with 0%, 0.3%, 1%, and 2% annual emission reductions.

The prediction result of the 1% per annum reduction scenario from the Bern model corresponds to the constant emissions prediction scenario result from the linear sink model, and the 2% per annum reduction scenario from the Bern model corresponds to the 0.3% reduction scenario from the linear sink model. Therefore, the question of which model is correct may greatly affect future policy decisions.

Within the next 10 to 20 years, it will be easier to see which model will come closest to reality.

Conclusions

The linear carbon sink model is primarily a consequence of mass conservation resp. the continuity equation. From measurements we see an increasing sink effect which has been a strict linear function of CO2 concentration for the last 65 years. When this statistically highly significant model is accepted for the past – where its validity is obvious –, important implications follow.

By removing the “noise” from the CO2 concentration growth while keeping the trend, the modelled concentration growth data exhibit a clear maximum in 2013 and a declining trend since then. This is fully consistent with the fact that since more than 10 years anthropogenic emissions have been approximately constant. The fact that concentration growth declines when emissions are constant, is a nice validation of the linear carbon sink model.

The linear carbon sink model introduces a strict relation between the measured data, and the model parameter of equilibrium concentration. When the traditional natural equilibrium without anthropogenic emissions of 280 ppm is accepted, then the assumed constant rate of land use change emissions of the last 65 years is restricted to 0.15 PgC per annum.         

The linear carbon sink model has proven to be of high predictive value. The concentrations of the years 2000-2020 have been predicted with high accuracy from the 2000-2020 anthropogenic emissions and the model built with the 1950-1999 data. 

There is one potential weakness in the linear carbon sink model. The oceanic and photosynthesis sink systems are of finite size, but the model assumes no saturation effect. This contrasts with the box and diffusion models used by other researchers. The Bern model, in particular, claims that the foreseeable capacity of the natural sink systems is effectively only 4 times larger than the atmosphere, with the result, that 20% of all emissions remain in the atmosphere for at least 1000 years. Up to now, not the slightest sign of saturation of the natural sink systems can be detected. We can assume, therefore, that there will be no drastic change of this in the near future.

The simple fact that both models can explain the emission and concentration data of the past very well, makes it necessary to check the deviations in the future. For this purpose, 4 possible emission scenarios have been evaluated by both models, and future researchers and historians will find out which model will have made the better predictions of CO2 concentrations.    

You will buy the batteries that unreliable wind and solar need, but the government will own them…

So one EV consumes as much electricity as 15 houses, and we want to add a million to an unreliable grid? Where is all that electricity coming from?

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Image by Nerijus jakimavičius from Pixabay

They want you in an EV so they can use your battery to rescue the unreliable grid they built

There is a desperate need to add billions of dollars worth of batteries to smooth out our volatile grids. As I said last year:

The hapless homeowners will buy the back up battery for the grid and install it in their garage. (Sometimes they might drive it too.)

It’s so much the better if the unwashed masses pay for the batteries themselves, and so it has come to pass. Some academics in Canberra are excited that they finally proved the point and sucked some electricity out of 16 cars at a tight moment in February.

A vehicle-to-grid response: Electric vehicles fed power into Australian grid during blackout, says report

During a major storm event that eventually cut power to tens of thousands of homes, a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) were able to feed power back into Australia’s electricity grid, according to a new report from The Australian National University (ANU).

These 16 cars provided all of 107 kilowatts for an unspecified length of time.

They let slip just what a drain EV’s will be on the average household.

“Stopping just 6,000 EVs charging would have kept the power on for those 90,000 customers whose power was cut on February 13.

So one EV consumes as much electricity as 15 houses, and we want to add a million to an unreliable grid? Where is all that electricity coming from?

And as Andrew Bolt points out, you might have been charging your car for a reason…

There’s huge bushfires, say. They knock out electricity lines, like the ones that went down and triggered Victoria’s big blackout. Your EV, which you were charging at home, is suddenly drained to save the electricity system. And then the fires approach. Or the floods.

So after they subsidize your EV purchase, and you think you have a good deal, they’ll raise the price of electricity. Then they’ll offer their hostages discounts if they join the scheme and plug in the car every day. But when your car battery depreciates “to landfill”, or your house burns to the ground, you’ll be the one paying the bill.

UPDATE: To clarify —  It will be voluntary but only the wealthy will really have the choice…   Like air conditioners that the government switches off in our homes on hot days, the unwashed masses will find the “discounts” offered to keep their car plugged in at peak hour will be hard to refuse.

Expensive electricity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Cheap electricity gives power to the people. Expensive electricity gives power to the bureaucrats who control the complicated pricing schemes. The bureaucrats give discounts to encourage certain “patterns of behavior”. The wealthy do what they want.

h/t Bally and MeAgain.

REFERENCE

Bjorn C. P. Sturmberg et al, Vehicle-to-grid response to a frequency contingency in a national grid – successes and shortcomings (2024). DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-4445838/v1

Nothing unprecedented about hot U.S. summer days

No matter how often journalists repeat the lie that summers are becoming more extreme in the U.S., it doesn’t make their claims true.

From CFACT

By Chris Martz

No matter how often journalists repeat the lie that summers are becoming more extreme in the U.S., it doesn’t make their claims true.

So, I’ll post this chart again.

I’ll post this as many times as I need to this summer until it resonates. Study it and stare at it until your eyes fall out of their sockets. And, when they do, finger them back into your skull and study this some more until it is burned into your retinas. 

This plot shows the average number of days per year with daily maximum temperatures ≥95°, ≥100° and ≥105° per USHCN station since 1895. ️

The trend is down. ⬇️

You will not see this reported anywhere in the press. I guarantee it. The extremes don’t increase at the same rate that the background warming does. Extremes are a reflection of the bounds of natural variability. Trends don’t create extremes.

There is also no such thing as “climate-fueled heat.” That’s media-spun BS. The climate is not a fuel. Local environmental conditions at the time of occurrence are. That’s called “weather.” Stop confusing the two concepts.

Thanks for coming to my science lecture.

Follow Chris on Twitter: https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX

Claim: Teachers Should Add “Truthful Hope” to Moderate Child Climate Trauma

Education and trauma research academics have just noticed even their own kids are being messed up by climate alarmist narratives.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Education and trauma research academics have just noticed even their own kids are being messed up by climate alarmist narratives.

Trauma-sensitive climate change education can develop truthful hope

Published: July 9, 2024 7.27am AEST

Nathalie Reid Director, Child Trauma Research Centre, Sessional Lecturer Faculty of Education, University of Regina
Audrey Aamodt Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Regina
Jennifer MacDonald Professor, Department of Education, University of Regina

…

Doom and gloom discourses encountered at school and through multimedia exposure risk evoking worry, fear, anxiety and hopelessness. 

To enhance a growing understanding of complex climate emotions, we think it’s important to notice feelings like climate anxiety and climate trauma, among others.

…

Canadian youth experience climate emotions like fear, sadness, anxiety and helplessness. In a recent survey by Lakehead University researchers of 1,000 youth between the ages of 16 to 25 across Canada, almost 80 per cent of youth reported climate change affects their mental health.

…

For Nathalie, one of the authors of this story, concern about symptoms of climate trauma hit home when her 10-year-old came home from school with a declaration: “I am not going to have kids. I am not bringing kids into a world that is going to blow up,” referring to what he was learning about the climate crisis.

…

We call for more complex understandings of the social, emotional, psychological and spiritual impacts of climate change education, which we have come to understand as truthful hope. Truthful hope attends to both forward-looking stories and complex climate emotions in the practice of trauma-sensitive climate change education. 

…Read more: 

https://theconversation.com/trauma-sensitive-climate-change-education-can-develop-truthful-hope-230817

For some kids there is no happy ending to this story;

The following is testimony given by Dr. Alex Wodak in 2019 to a NSW Ice addiction inquiry. Dr Wodak (now retired) is a renowned Aussie substance abuse and rehabilitation specialist.

…

First, the threshold step is redefining drugs as primarily a health and social issue rather than primarily a law enforcement issue. Second, drug treatment has to be expanded and improved until it reaches the same level as other health services. Third, all penalties for personal drug use and possession have to be scrapped.

Fourth, as much of the drug market as possible has to be regulated while recognising that part of the drug market is already regulated, such a methadone treatment, needle and syringe programs, medically supervised injecting centres. It will, of course, never be possible to regulate the entire drug market. We have regulated parts of the drug market before. Edible opium was taxed and regulated in Australia until 1906 and in the United States Coca-Cola contained cocaine until 1903.

Fifth, efforts to reduce the demand for powerful psychoactive drugs in Australia have had limited benefit and require a new focus. Unless and until young Australians feel optimistic about their future, demand for drugs will remain strong. Young people, understandably, want more certainty about their future prospects, including climate, education, jobs and housing affordability. Change will be slow and incremental, like all social policy reform.

As Herb Stein, as adviser to President Nixon said:
Things that cannot go on forever don’t.

Drug prohibition cannot go on forever and will be replaced by libertarian paternalism. Thank you.

…Source: https://www.iceinquiry.nsw.gov.au//assets/scii/transcripts/Decriminalisation-round-table/Decriminalisation-Roundtable-Transcript.pdf (available on Wayback Machine)

How do we begin to undo the damage, and prevent more damage?

If our society does not find a solution and change course, the next teenage social media craze could be the save the planet overpopulation plastic bag challenge.

Media Reports Earth’s ‘1.5C Temperature limit’ was ‘breached for 12 months in a row’ – Nothing Bad Happened

Recently, several media outlets claimed that June 2024 was the hottest June on record globally and that it topped off a string of 12 or 13 warmer than normal months, which they blamed on human-induced climate change. Each of the news stories made false claims of reaching climate tipping points, extreme weather events, and that the extended streak of hot temperatures proved a “climate crisis” was at hand.

From ClimateRealism

By Anthony Watts

Recently, several media outlets claimed that June 2024 was the hottest June on record globally and that it topped off a string of 12 or 13 warmer than normal months, which they blamed on human-induced climate change. Each of the news stories made false claims of reaching climate tipping points, extreme weather events, and that the extended streak of hot temperatures proved a “climate crisis” was at hand.

Here are some of the headlines: Temperatures 1.5C above pre-industrial era average for 12 months, data shows (The Guardian,) June sizzled to a 13th straight monthly heat record, but July might break string (National Public Radio,) and World in line for hottest year as 1.5C limit breached for 12 months in a row (Financial Times.)

That ongoing 1.5C temperature limit scare-story has people around the world rattled. For example, this infographic from The Asia-Pacific branch of the International Union of Food workers (IUF) says (bold author’s):

Global warming caused by human activities reached approximately 1°C over the past 170 years, increasing at 0.2°C per decade. Scientists warn that an average rise of more than 1.5°C in the surface temperature of the earth compared to pre-industrial levels will be catastrophic for the environment and human health.

But despite 12 months of the globe being above the so-called temperature limit, nothing bad happened on a global scale. Claims of climate catastrophe once we passed the so-called 1.5C temperature limit, never happened. The limit was nothing more than a political talking point from the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, as described in this Associated Press article: The magic 1.5: What’s behind climate talks’ key elusive goal. The AP wrote, “in a way both the ‘1.5 and 2 degree C thresholds are somewhat arbitrary,’ Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson said in an email. ‘Every tenth of a degree matters!’”

Now, despite surpassing that arbitrary limit, the “crisis” progressive politicians and alarmists in the mainstream media have been warning about failed to materialize.

First let’s check the global temperature. The source of all these news stories comes from a recent press release by Copernicus, part of the European Commission. A graph by Copernicus, seen in Figure 1 below, illustrates the “limit” and the 12-month temperature peak:

Figure 1 – Twelve-month running mean anomalies of the global average surface air temperature relative to the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average, based on monthly values from January 1940 to May 2024. Data source: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF.

Note the sharp peak in Figure 1 topping out at 1.63°C. In Figure 2 below, there’s detail provided by Copernicus concerning the year-long peak of temperature.

Figure 2- Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from January 1940 to May 2024, plotted as time series for consecutive 12-month periods spanning June to May of the following year. The last 12 months (June 2023 – May 2024) are shown with a thick red line while all other years with thin lines shaded according to the decade, from blue (1940s) to brick red (2020s). Data source: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF.

Note in Figure 2 that global temperature is already coming down from the peak that occurred 5 months ago. Soon, it will likely be below the 1.5°C mark.

As you can see in Figure 1 and confirmed in Figure 2, this sharp upshoot of temperature is unlike anything prior in the temperature record. It makes you wonder; why? Did mankind suddenly go on a fossil fuel burning blitz to create more carbon dioxide in a single year?

No, but there was a unique volcanic eruption. According to this article from NASA Research, A volcanic eruption sent enough water vapor into the stratosphere to cause a rapid change in chemistry. They say:

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano on January 15, 2022, produced the largest underwater explosion ever recorded by modern scientific instruments, blasting an enormous amount of water and volcanic gases higher than any other eruption in the satellite era.

In case you didn’t know, NASA also says in this article Steamy Relationships: How Atmospheric Water Vapor Amplifies Earth’s Greenhouse Effect that water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas:

Water vapor is Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of Earth’s greenhouse effect — the process that occurs when gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap the Sun’s heat. Greenhouse gases keep our planet livable. Without them, Earth’s surface temperature would be about 59 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) colder.

So, imagine for the first time in history since humans have been able measure such a thing, the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano injected massive, megaton levels (146 metric megatons) of water vapor into the stratosphere never seen before. See Figure 3 below.

Figure 3 – This graphic depicts how the ejection of water vapor from Hunga-Tonga volcano accelerated ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Credit: Chelsea Thompson/Chemical Sciences LaboratoryFigure 3 – This graphic depicts how the ejection of water vapor from Hunga-Tonga volcano accelerated ozone depletion in the stratosphere. Credit: Chelsea Thompson/Chemical Sciences Laboratory

According to a scientific paper published shortly after the eruption, “Observations from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) aboard the NASA Aura satellite immediately following the eruption indicated that this single event increased water vapor in Earth’s normally dry stratosphere by approximately 10%.” With that much extra water vapor (the strongest greenhouse gas) injected into the atmosphere, global warming was guaranteed.

Another scientific article titled Tonga Eruption May Temporarily Push Earth Closer to 1.5°C of Warming said, “The underwater eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha’apai sent megatons of water vapor into the stratosphere, contributing to an increase in global warming over the next 5 years.”

In addition, there was immediate ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere. NASA Research says: “Our measurements showed that stratospheric ozone concentrations decreased rapidly – by as much as 30% in air with the highest water vapor concentrations – in the immediate wake of the eruption.”

The EPA says, “The ozone layer in the stratosphere absorbs a portion of the radiation from the sun, preventing it from reaching the planet’s surface.” So, with less ozone, more sunlight reached the surface of the planet than it usually does, and the extra energy hangs around in the atmosphere due to the increased water vapor in the role of a greenhouse gas. The eruption had a double-whammy effect on Earth’s atmosphere, you could have bet your bottom dollar that the planet would get warmer as a result.

And it did. This completely natural volcanic event created the spike in temperature to 1.63°C seen in Figure 1. Meanwhile the media, whether out of unintentional or willful ignorance, remains oblivious to how the atmosphere responded to the volcano.  Accordingly, they are still writing misleading scare stories, blaming humans for the recent increase in temperature due to their use of modern energy and transportation, such as what CNN wrote in a recent article about the spike in global temperature:

The climate crisis is driven primarily from humans burning coal, oil and gas for energy. El Niño, a natural climate pattern that originates in the Pacific Ocean, has also boosted temperatures in much of the world in recent months.

No mention of the volcano or resultant water vapor blast letting humans off the hook. Surprised? Don’t be. This shameless pattern of “the world is getting hotter and it is your fault” has been repeated over and over again by the media for years. When evidence that humans are not at fault for the current warming spike is widely and easily available, the media ignores it. Even though nothing bad happened on a global scale from the Hunga-Tonga volcanic event, they seem even more focused on the false narrative of a “climate crisis,” rather than factual reporting. It’s shameful and wrong.

Meanwhile, the much warned about 1.5C temperature increase was exceeded for an entire year, yet extreme weather events and the numbers of deaths due to temperature and weather did not see an unusual increase. This undermines years of assertions by the mainstream media who’ve claimed that more severe and more frequent extreme weather events and more deaths would be the inevitable result of exceeding the 1.5C temperature increase threshold. Chalk that up to one more in a long-train of failed predictions.

What will the media say in a couple of years when temperatures go back down as the extra water vapor dissipates and the ozone returns to normal? Perhaps they’ll embrace Emily Littela with a collective “never mind!”

Google’s Net Zero Plans Are Going Up in Smoke

For years, the search giant has touted its alt-energy deals and net zero plans. But these four charts show that Google’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity, are soaring.

From the Robert Bryce Substack

Robert Bryce

For years, the search giant has touted its alt-energy deals and net zero plans. But these four charts show that Google’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity, are soaring.

In 2017, Google declared it had reached “100% renewable energy for our global operations.” The company continued, “Google became carbon neutral in 2007, and since then, our carbon footprint has grown more slowly than our business — proof, 10 years later, that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental impact and resource use.”

That “decoupling” didn’t last long.

In fact, since 2017, Google’s environmental reports show that the company’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity have soared. The most recent numbers came out last Tuesday when the search and advertising colossus released its 2024 environmental report. And the numbers don’t lie. As seen in the chart below, since 2017, CO2 emissions at Google have jumped four-fold to a company record of 14.3 million tons in 2023.

Why does this matter? There are many reasons. First among them: Google has been among the most aggressive promoters of the notion that it was a different kind of company, a “clean” industry from Silicon Valley that wouldn’t pollute like old industrial companies such as U.S. Steel or ExxonMobil. But the latest numbers show that Google is, at root, an industrial company that relies on massive digital foundries — that’s a better description than the anodyne “data centers” — that use staggering quantities of juice. Further, the company’s electricity needs could never be supplied by wind and solar alone. Or to put it bluntly, Google’s claims about decoupling itself from the realities of the physical world and the vagaries of electric grids were little more than corporate greenwashing.

Second, Google isn’t just a giant of Big Tech, it’s among the most dominant corporations of our era. It controls 92% of the search engine market. For comparison, Microsoft’s Bing has a 3% share. Google is the world’s most-visited website. Coming in at number two is YouTube, which is owned by Google, or rather, by the parent company, Alphabet. Thus, whether we like it or not, Google has become interwoven with our online experiences, and as shown in the chart below, those experiences have a growing carbon footprint.

What’s driving the increase? Its new report says emissions grew by 13% in 2023, “primarily driven by increased data center energy consumption and supply chain emissions.”

Third, Google has aggressively moved to squash debate over climate change on its platform, including on YouTube. In 2021, as reported by Axios, Google announced a policy that:

Prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content on its platforms via ads or creator payments….It’s one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation…Google advertisers and publishers will be prohibited from making ad revenue off content that contradicts “well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.”

As the chart below shows, the CO2 intensity of Google’s operations has doubled since 2020. That’s not misinformation. Those numbers come directly from the company’s reports. (Those reports are long and challenging to read. Further, the company has not been consistent in its reporting. I used the 2024, 2021, and 2019 reports.) But don’t expect to see these trends reported by major media outlets.

Fourth, just as Google dominates search, it also dominates the stock market. If you own an index fund that tracks the S&P 500, you own Google. The company’s market cap of $2.4 trillion and surging growth make it a must-own for any exchange-traded fund that invests in growth stocks or the broader stock market. For instance, Alphabet represents about 4.3% of the stock holdings in State Street’s S&P 500 ETF (Ticker: SPY). Thus, Google’s rising greenhouse gas emissions reflect the broader economy in the U.S.

Finally, Google is signaling that it cannot achieve net zero. The company’s chief sustainability officer, Kate Brandt, told the Associated Press last week that reaching net zero by 2030 “is an extremely ambitious goal. We know this is not going to be easy and that our approach will need to continue to evolve.” (For more on that topic, see my June 3 piece, “Vaclav Smil Calls Bullshit on Net Zero.”) Brandt continued, saying the company will have to manage “a lot of uncertainty, including this uncertainty around the future of AI’s environmental impacts.”

Indeed, given the trajectory of its emissions growth and its ongoing push to build massive new data centers for AI — particularly in countries where the electric grids rely mainly on hydrocarbons — it’s safe to assume that Google’s emissions will continue climbing for years to come. In April, it announced it would spend $3 billion on new data centers in the U.S., including $2 billion in Indiana, which gets about 45% of its electricity from coal-fired power plants. Further, in its latest environmental report, the company said that although it’s making progress on “clean” energy, there are “some hard-to-decarbonize regions like Asia Pacific” where carbon-free electricity “isn’t readily available. In addition we often see longer lead times between initial investments and construction of clean energy projects and the resulting GHG reductions from them.”  

Of course, Amazon and other Big Tech companies are (finally!) showing interest in nuclear energy. In March, Amazon Web Services acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus in Pennsylvania, which will allow AWS to buy as much as 480 megawatts of power from the nearby 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear plant. But there isn’t enough nuclear capacity for all of the Big Tech companies to power their digital foundries with fission power, not here in the U.S. and certainly not in other countries.

Last week, I talked to Doug Hohulin, a Kansas City-based technologist who works on AI and closely follows the data center sector. He summed up the predicament facing Google and the other power-hungry members of Big Tech. “There’s just not enough wind and solar available,” he said. “Nuclear used to be seen as bad, and now it’s good.”

Both of those statements are true. Right now, it appears that Google and other Big Tech companies will see continuing increases in emissions until the U.S. and other countries get lots of new reactors built and online. That won’t happen quickly and it won’t be cheap. But Google’s emissions show that Big Tech doesn’t have many other choices.

Speaking Engagements In Nantucket And Newport This Week On Offshore Wind

I will be giving two lectures this week on offshore wind. On Monday, July 8, I’ll be in Nantucket speaking at the Dreamland Theater. Start time is 6 pm. Click here for tickets.

On Tuesday, the 9th, I’ll be in Newport, RI, at Emmanuel Church. The start time for that event is 5:30 pm. More info on the Newport event is available here.

If you are in the area, by all means, please attend. I will discuss the history of the offshore wind industry, the threat it poses to critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, and the future of American energy. Hint: It’s still N2N: natural gas to nuclear.

The U.S. Navy proves nuclear is better

“Bad Boys” Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, both formerly of the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, just posted an article contending that, in the long run, nuclear energy is cheaper (and better) than wind or solar (though not as cheap as coal or natural gas) despite high up-front capital costs.

One obvious reason is that wind turbines and solar arrays have much shorter lifespans than nuclear facilities, which are initially commissioned for 40 years and can apply for 20-year extensions thereafter; many today anticipate an 80-year lifespan. They also require one-thirtieth of the land needed for solar; wind farms would require 200 times more land.

From CFACT

By Duggan Flanakin

“Bad Boys” Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, both formerly of the Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment, just posted an article contending that, in the long run, nuclear energy is cheaper (and better) than wind or solar (though not as cheap as coal or natural gas) despite high up-front capital costs.

One obvious reason is that wind turbines and solar arrays have much shorter lifespans than nuclear facilities, which are initially commissioned for 40 years and can apply for 20-year extensions thereafter; many today anticipate an 80-year lifespan. They also require one-thirtieth of the land needed for solar; wind farms would require 200 times more land.

Orr and Rolling compare building a nuclear plant to obtaining a mortgage on a house; as the upfront cost is paid off (or recuperated), the operational costs dwindle. New York’s Nine Mile Point Unit 1 has been in operation since 1969, round the clock, while wind and solar facilities are weather-dependent.

Orr and Rolling two years ago found that meeting Minnesota’s total electricity demand would require over 100,000 megawatts of installed wind and solar capacity but just 16,379 megawatts of new and existing nuclear plants plus some battery storage and the retrofitting of a North Dakota coal plant with carbon capture and storage technology.

Further proof that nuclear is cheaper than wind or solar, they say, comes from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Form 1 data. Existing nuclear plants were generating electricity at a nationwide average of $26.19 — $20.15 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in Virginia, $21.71 in North Carolina, and a whopping $37.00 in Minnesota. Yet FERC data showed that existing wind and solar facilities cost $52/MWh and $73/MWh, respectively.

Rogé Karma, who covers economics and economic policy at The Atlantic, argues that building new nuclear plants affordably is essential if the U.S. is to meet its climate goals. While wind and solar, he notes, can technically be bolstered to power the entire electricity grid, political realities weigh heavily against that ever happening.

The chief reason? Wind and solar require massive amounts of land.

Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study found that reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would require solar panels on land equivalent to the entire state of Virginia and wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. Building new transmission lines to transport that energy from the wind and solar facilities to energy markets provides even bigger challenges.

Karma also notes that nuclear reactors can be built to easily tie into existing transmission lines and that, on average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project and pay those workers 50 percent more. Best of all, they now have overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington.

There’s just one problem, says Karma. America has forgotten how to build nuclear capacity cost-efficiently. But that may soon be changing, especially if new micro-reactor designs can win over regulators and energy users. The cost-efficiency of yesterday’s nuclear plants can be traced to the fact that the 94 operating plants today are based on more than 50 different designs, meaning there are no economies of scale or lessons learned from earlier similar models.

A second reason, Karma notes, is that after the U.S. stopped building nuclear plants in the 1980s there soon was no trained workforce with any experience in nuclear plant construction. That is a major reason the Vogtle Unit 3 plant ended up costing $35 billion, while its sister Unit 4 cost 30 percent less to build. One simple incorrect rebar installation caused a 30-week regulatory delay.

By contrast, the U.S. Navy has been commissioning nuclear submarines since 1955 and nuclear aircraft carriers since 1961. America’s nuclear submarines are commissioned with enough uranium fuel to last more than 30 years, operating at high speed for longer periods than diesel-electric submarines. Because they do not require air, they can also stay submerged at deep depths for months at a time.

The pioneer nuclear aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Enterprise, cruised more than 200,000 miles over 3 years before needing refueling. The tiny space occupied by the reactors freed up space for aviation fuel, ordnance, and stores, while its top speed of over 30 knots made it the fastest warship afloat. Today, the U.S. has 10 Nimitz-class carriers and one Ford-class in service; France’s Charles de Gaulle is the only other nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Nuclear submarines are similar to other nuclear reactors but work as heat engines rather than to produce electricity. The uranium fission releases energy used to heat water to produce steam that drives the turbines that power the propellers. These reactors are comparable in size to the micro-reactors that soon may power large industrial facilities, data centers, mining operations, and other high-energy users – or even residential communities in remote locations.

President Biden in May signed legislation to help jumpstart a revival of the U.S. nuclear power industry, and Bill Gates’ TerraPower just broke ground on a “next-generation” nuclear reactor in Wyoming. But the main obstacle to a rejuvenated nuclear industry in the U.S. remains the regulatory mindset at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA, according to Robert Hargraves, co-founder of ThorCon International, which seeks to build thorium reactors.

Hargraves charges that U.S. regulators do not analyze data about human health effects of radiation from nuclear power but still rely on “groupthink consensus evolved in nongovernmental organizations originally misled by grant-seeking geneticists.” Hargraves argues that nuclear power plants should be treated just as other power plants, with individual owners and operators assigned liability for any radiation harm (which has been nearly nonexistent).

Eliminating the costs and delays caused by anti-nuclear regulators at the NRC and the EPA would go a long way toward the nuclear future, which was all the rage back before the first Earth Day began poisoning the nuclear well. But so would providing incentives for financing new nuclear plants.

The U.S. has done it for the Navy – nuclear carriers and submarines are very expensive upfront but pay for themselves over time. Nuclear is the only “clean” pathway (and far easier on living beings than wind or solar) to a clean energy future that can power an AI-friendly society. And it leaves Joshua trees, eagles, whales, bats, and ordinary farm, forest, and prairie animals and plants alone – people, too.

Fibreglass From Shredded Wind Turbine Blades Renders Farming Land Useless

Farmers foolish enough to enter contracts with wind power outfits soon live to regret it. Having their land permanently contaminated by shredded fibreglass when turbines explode into balls of flame and/or their blades merely disintegrate (known in the trade as “component liberation”) is just one of a list of disasters waiting to happen.

From STOP THESE THINGS

Farmers foolish enough to enter contracts with wind power outfits soon live to regret it. Having their land permanently contaminated by shredded fibreglass when turbines explode into balls of flame and/or their blades merely disintegrate (known in the trade as “component liberation”) is just one of a list of disasters waiting to happen.

At first blush, being paid an annual license fee of $10-25,000 per turbine, per year sounds lucrative enough. However, put that against the $600,000 plus cost of demolishing and removing a single turbine, and the deal soon loses its gloss. Indeed, the ultimate multi-million-dollar cost of removing dozens of turbines from a farming property, makes the piddling revenue stream look like chump change.

With plenty of evidence to show that these things have an economic lifespan of around 15 years – not the wildly ambitious 25 years touted by the wind industry – farmers considering signing up to 25-year landholder agreements have good reason to think hard before they sign.

In a sorry (but perfectly avoidable) tale from Iowa, regret comes in the form of the inability to use their land for farming at all.

The saga started with one self-immolating unit that spread its shredded fibreglass blades far and wide, followed by another that torched itself a year later and did much the same.

The wind power outfit concerned resorted to the usual suite of lies and hollow promises. Leaving the farmers concerned with scorched piles of junk and without land to farm, or fodder for their livestock – as well as rendering them liable to compensate their neighbours for the loss of their fibreglass contaminated land, as well. Welcome to your wind powered future!

Iowa farmer regrets signing wind turbine lease after both turbines on her land burned to the ground
Bucoa
Mike the Writer
1 June 2024

A couple of hours before the final BOS vote on the WECS on Wednesday, May 29, we received an email from a concerned lady in Iowa who has – well, had – two wind turbines on their farm and asked us to share their story. One turbine is still there, but it’s a non-functional burned out husk as of May 13. The other one also burned a year ago. Her name and exact location are being withheld because more than a year later, they are still trying to resolve their problems with the wind energy company that put the turbines there.

The second wind wind turbine burning

On March 25, 2023 the first of their turbines was struck by lightning and burned. The second turbine burned on May 13, of this year. The wind energy company told her that one got hit by lightning too. But there was actually no lightning in the area at the time.

When she asked about lightning and fire suppression systems? They told her that it’s cheaper to clean them up after they burn than it is to maintain the lightning protection and fire suppression systems. You’ll see why later in this article when you discover what they actually did to “clean” up the mess they left behind.

The company has removed the first turbine but has not cleaned up any of the debris. It is now completely worked into the ground. Because it was windy and the wind changed direction the next day, the second turbine spread debris over at least 300 acres, which included 3 neighboring farms. They now have a cornfield that is growing fast and full of wind turbine fiberglass. They bale corn stalks to feed their cows. She didn’t know what they would have done if this had happened in October as they would not have been able to feed those cows. As it is, they can’t graze them on land that is heavily contaminated with fiberglass.

Part of the their field that burned after one of the wind turbine fires

Their volunteer fire department could do nothing to put out the fire on the turbines. Rural fire departments never can because of the difficulty of trying to fight a fire that is a combined material fire, chemical fire, and possibly electrical fire that is burning hundreds of feet in the air. In addition, the fire department is not allowed to even go within the fall radius of the turbine for safety reasons. So all they can do is let the ground burn for a distance on all sides of the turbine out to the height of the tower (300 feet on all sides in this case) and hope they can stop it from going farther once it has burned beyond the fall radius.

They can construct firebreaks, but good luck building them fast enough for an area that large, especially if it is windy. The amount of manpower required would be enormous. In fact one firefighter told her they would probably have had to “call in the cavalry.” If the fire had happened in the Fall, it could have spread too fast, or jumped the breaks, and destroyed thousands of acres of crops due to the amount of dry fuel available (dried corn stalks).

One of the destroyed wind turbines

After the first fire, the wind company contracted with a clean-up crew to clean up the damage. It was three people with three shop vacs to clean up the “heavily contaminated” areas over an area of around 20 acres for three days. Yes, you read that right. Three people, three shop vacs, three days, to clean up around 20 acres of land. They have no intention of cleaning any of the land that is less heavily contaminated and plan to just leave the debris in the fields.

No cleanup plan has been made yet for the second turbine, and they are not allowed to talk to the cleanup company anymore. Is it any wonder it is cheaper to “clean them up” after they burn than it is to maintain fire suppression and lightning protection systems so they don’t burn in the first place? She and her family are now picking up the debris by themselves.

An instant shower is necessary to rid their bodies of the fiberglass they have handled and dug out of the dirt. Some studies have suggested that small fiberglass particles can lodge deep in the lungs and cause health problems years or even decades later. A gigantic crane has been sitting on their property for a year but has done nothing. Their soil is compacted and their drainage tiles are ruined. The erosion from the fields where cover crops could not be planted because it would hide the fiberglass is terrible. And the rain is washing the contamination into other fields.

A large ball of fiberglass found in their field after one of the turbines burned
Smaller fiberglass strands in the field. Seems the wind company has no intention of even looking for, much less trying to clean up the thousands, if not tens of thousands of strands like this that contaminate the field now

She also said the turbines have had one problem after another. Even the technicians complained about having to continually work on them. One of the biggest problems was the constant leaking of oil into the fields. Oil, as you probably know, is insoluble in water, so rain will not the dilute the oil. It will just keep getting pushed farther and farther into the ground until it eventually ends up in the aquifer, where it will contaminate rural wells with industrial machine oil.

As a side note, I used to work on the ground crew at a regional airport. One of my duties was refueling large passenger aircraft up to, and including Boeing 737s and Air Force C-130 transports. If we spilled more than a few gallons of jet fuel (which is similar to kerosene and basically a type of fuel oil), we had to call in a hazmat cleanup team immediately. But it seems wind turbine companies are subject to no such regulations if one of their turbines suffers a catastrophic failure and spills dozens of gallons of industrial machine oil into the soil.

The lady who contacted us was so frustrated that she called the farmer in New York who had the same problem to see if there was any solution (you can read that article here Updated: This article was corrected on 6-3-2024. The original article stated that the cleanup contract was 3 people with 3 shop vacs who had 3 days to clean 300 acres. The actual contract is for them to clean heavily contaminated areas of less than 20 acres. As of now, there are no plans at all to clean anything other than the heavily contaminated areas within a distance of approximately 20 acres around the turbine.
Bucoa

A Permanent Subsidy? Nuclear Power’s Price-Anderson Act (5 Extensions, 89 years)

“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” wrote Milton and Rose Friedman in their 1979 classic, Free to Choose. “The so-called infants never grow up.” And several years later, the two wrote: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”

From Master Resource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“The infant industry argument is a smoke screen,” wrote Milton and Rose Friedman in their 1979 classic, Free to Choose. “The so-called infants never grow up.” And several years later, the two wrote: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” [1]

Previous posts have documented the “permanent subsidies” of industrial wind power (14 extensions) and of solar power (15 extensions). [2] Add nuclear liability protection to this list, although the technology has long been declared safe by the industry and its proponents.

The Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act of 1957 became law as Section 170 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. It was supposed to be a ten-year window to allow commercial nuclear power to prove its economy and safety. But the so-called Price-Anderson Act–capping damage claims “to protect the public and to encourage the development of the atomic energy industry”–is still with us, some two-thirds of a century later.

The 1957 law’s limit of $60 million per plant (about 10x in today’s dollars) was joined by an up-to-$500 million indemnification guarantee per accident. These provisions, vetted among the beneficiaries, was just enough to remove a major barrier to the commercialization of nuclear power for electric utilities sponsors and for builders Westinghouse, GE, and others. Rate base incentives for utilities was also crucial for the new energy industry to compete against coal and hydro for electrical generation.

No payouts resulted in the ten-year period, but the private sector was not ready to stand on its own. The involved parties lobbied for $100 million per accident, which became $74 million in a 10-year extension in 1966, a small increase in real terms. This first extension would not be the last….

Subsidy enough? Nope, the second extension came in 1975 (for 12 years); the third in 1988 (20 years, with the cap increased from $500 million to $9.43 billion); the fourth in 2005 (20 years); and fifth in 2024 (40 years, to 2066). [3]

Surely, nearly 70 years after the initial “temporary” law, the nuclear industry could have repealed Price-Anderson and let the private insurance market sort things out. Commercial nuclear power is safe, right? Claims under Price-Anderson have been small or none. The collected $13 billion would ensure a smooth transition to the private market. Safer units should not subsidize the less safe, right?

Wrong! The nuclear industry needed to remove 2025, and last year the talk was for a decade, maybe 20 years. And the industry got more under favorable political circumstances. The result: 40 years–to 2065.

“Congress’s 40-year extension of a law limiting how much money nuclear power companies are on the hook for prompted sighs of relief from the industry and supporters of the measure,” The Hill reported, “who say the liability limit provides certainty for insurers and investors in the carbon-free power source.” To critics, the sweetheart subsidy was done in darkness.

————

[1] Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, p. 49; Tyranny of the Status Quo, p. 115.

[2] The tax credit for wind temporarily expired (without retroactive true-up) for a brief period in 1992.

[3] The extensions of the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act of 1957 (Public Law 85-256, 71 Stat. 576) have been:

Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 1966 (Public Law 89-645, 80 Stat. 891)

Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 1975 (Public Law 94-197, 89 Stat 1111)

Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 1988 (Public Law 100-408, 102 Stat. 1066)

Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 2005, Public Law 109-58, 119 Stat. 594)

Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy Act of 2024, S.870.

Knowing Nature & Ourselves (Part 1.)

One of the best ways to know something about the underwater world, including Great Barrier Reef ecosystems, is to strap an air tank to your back and step into the Coral Sea. If you take a camera, you may have a permanent record of what you observe.

From Jennifer Marohasy

 By jennifer

I am very privileged to have some wonderful friends, who still take the time to observe nature.   Once upon a time we found these people in universities studying the natural sciences, now we are perhaps more likely to find them in film school or at iNaturalist.

One of the best ways to know something about the underwater world, including Great Barrier Reef ecosystems, is to strap an air tank to your back and step into the Coral Sea.   If you take a camera, you may have a permanent record of what you observe.

This is the beginnings of being a marine biologist.   Observation is fundamental to science; science begins with gathering information.

To be a real biologist you must make your own direct observations about the natural world.   You can’t be a biologist and rely on the observations of others, they must be your own.    If you relied mostly on the measurements of others, then it would be like claiming to be a photographer but only republishing photographs taken by others.   You may be a publisher, but not a photographer.  It would be deceitful to claim otherwise.

Some people are like this.  They take the work of others and claim it as their own.  It may be measurements, or it may be photographs.   Of course, some photographs can be transcribed and understood as numbers, or they can be a direct measure of something.

Photographs have tremendous value in science.

When I knelt next to that giant coral on the sandy sea floor in the Garden of Porites at Myrmidon reef some years ago, and when Stuart Ireland took a photograph of me beside it, for sure we already now had a permanent record of the size of that monster coral.  At one level I functioned as a yardstick of its size.  From knowing my height, it would be possible to calculate the height of the coral.  In fact, we went on to measure the height and width of that same coral with a tape measure.

For sure, you can be a data analysis by relying on information from others, but a scientist gathers their own information however limited and however imprecise.

You can become very famous never making your own direct observations, never looking through a telescope at the stars yourself, for example.  But please don’t tell me that you are a scientist.  That would be deceitful.   To repeat, you may be an analyst who is good at self promotion even a manager with a large team, but that doesn’t make you a scientist.  You may have your name on so many scientific papers, but if you have no first hand knowledge of how the data was gathered.   That doesn’t make you a scientist.

To be sure, if you are really a marine biologist then you will have observed the underwater world up-close with your own eyes, just as if you are really an underwater photographer you take your own photographs underwater.  You don’t republish photographs from others, and claim them as your own.

Photographers and cinematographers who know and understand their craft are always in search of authenticity.  They are looking for images that are not only an accurate representation of the world, but that also invoke feelings.   They are after much more than click bait on social media, or fame and money in the commercial world.  They know that they are unlikely to ever be properly financially compensated for their efforts.  After all, we increasingly live in a world that places little value on real knowledge and its accurate representation.

I have been listening to an audiobook that my daughter recommended, entitled ‘Why We Remember – The Science of Memory and How it Shapes Us’ by Dr Charan Ranganath.  It explains that as individuals we make decisions based on our feelings, that are a consequence of what we remember.  Much of this happens beyond the reach of our rational and conscious mind.  So, the stories that we tell our children, the photograph we keep, and the films we watch, they all matter.

It is not just the facts that make a difference, in fact the choices we make – good and bad – are often made irrespective of the facts of the matters before us.   It is how we remember the world that matters most.

Perhaps this is why families that have first-hand experience of the natural world know that it can be beautiful, and it can also be very destructive – many fishers, farmers and indigenous Australians remember this.  That nature gives, and nature also takes away.

Scuba divers, rock climbers and bushwalkers also have some knowledge of this, people who get out into nature often see the natural cycles of death and regeneration.

Many people now live in apartments in cities so removed from nature. This makes them so vulnerable to nonsense stories suggesting that coral cover, for example, must be increasing at the Great Barrier Reef, or it must be in terminal decline.  What they believe is more likely to depend on how the AI in their social media feed has categorised them and their interests.  These city people often fail to understand – because they have no memory – that more usually there are natural cycles of destruction and then regrowth in the real world.

Stuart Ireland emailed me this morning with photographs of terrible destruction from Tropical Cyclone Jasper.

He sent me the two photographs with a short note:

On my way back from Cooktown on the weekend …  witnessed what Jasper did to rivers and creeks near Wudaj Wudaj.

They are saying the weather event here was a 1/2,000-year event compared to Cairns 1/100 year.

The power of water is amazing but devastating … a water hole we used to swim at, gorgeous mountain stream, reduced to barren riverbed.

Photographs taken in almost same spot. They have reconstructed the whole road.

It’s just like how we felt diving John Brewer Reef after TC Kirrily.

Tropical Cyclone Kirrily did a lot of damage to John Brewer reef and we dived that reef soon after the destruction, and Stuart Ireland who is a marine biologist and cinematographer recorded it all.  As I explained in one of my very first short films, entitled ‘Beige Reef’ to film a coral reef is to acknowledge it, and also to provide a permanent record of the state of that reef for that moment in time.

The other thing my daughter has recommended recently is a ‘Mood App’.  I’ve just had a look to see if my app. has a word to perhaps better explain my feelings when I dived John Brewer with Stuart just three weeks after TC Kirrily.  Perhaps the most accurate word, to describe my feelings at that time is:

Stunned

Then I went back some few weeks later and I felt very differently.  I could already see signs of recovery and I felt, perhaps the best word is:

Optimistic

Just as the river bed that Stuart photographed on the weekend, it won’t stay a barren riverbed, and so John Brewer reef is already showing real signs of recovery.  And the fish never deserted this reef.   As I wrote in a blog post back in April:

When I first visited John Brewer Reef after Tropical Cyclone Kirrily my stomach churned, wondering if this jewel-in-the-crown would become so infested with algae the corals would all be smothered.   Diving the reef again last Thursday, ten weeks after TC Kirrily, I can see that there is something different and special about this location.

There are large schools of algal-eating fish passing through, mowing the algae as one might mow grass.   And so, from the pieces of broken coral that have fallen from the reef crest, there is opportunity for new growth.

When we witness and acknowledge destruction, there is opportunity to also know that regeneration can follow.  We can know and remember that nature is cycles.

There is opportunity to become so much less susceptible to the propaganda that tends to either deny what is happening with weather and climate or to suggest it is unprecedented.

I have often wondered.  How can it be that the ‘experts’ tend to see ‘nothing’ or ‘catastrophe’.   How is it that the natural cycles of life escape them?

Then I realised this morning, after receiving the email from Stuart with the two photographs – if these experts have never been into nature, or if they have not been often enough, with their eyes properly open to the experience, and if they have not made their own observations, they will lack experience and they will lack context.

That is why it is so important going forward, that we begin to rely more on people who know something about the Great Barrier Reef from first-hand experience, from decades of experience getting into the water and seeing how it changes with their own eyes.  This is why we must begin to reject the false knowledge from academics who may actually know very little of real value and as a consequence their narrations may not actually be authentic.   When we are mislead, we lose resilience both as individuals and as a civilisation.

The reef crest at John Brewer some ten weeks after the cyclone.  It looked terrible, I felt terrible. But I know that there is already significant recovery. We need to know the death and destruction to understand that nature is cycles.  It is so important that we remember this, to know ourselves and to become resilient.