Day: July 18, 2024

No, OPB, Climate Change is Not Taking a Toll on Oregon Farmers

The news site OPB [Oregon Public Broadcasting] posted an article titled “Climate change increasingly taking a toll on Oregon farmers, ranchers,” which claims that climate change is having such a serious impact on Oregon agriculture that farmers need special climate grief counseling to cope. This is false.

From ClimateRealism

By Linnea Lueken

The news site OPB [Oregon Public Broadcasting] posted an article titled “Climate change increasingly taking a toll on Oregon farmers, ranchers,” which claims that climate change is having such a serious impact on Oregon agriculture that farmers need special climate grief counseling to cope. This is false. OPB claims that droughts, wildfires, and heat waves are all getting worse with climate change, however data show that this is not true for Oregon.

OPB claims that farmers and ranchers in the state are “increasingly dealing with severe droughts, wildfires, sweltering heat waves and pests that can all-together decimate entire fields.”

Later in the article OPB says “more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow in many areas of the Pacific Northwest,” and “there’s less snow and it melts earlier, which means less water will last long enough through winter and spring to feed streams and reservoirs for agricultural irrigators.” It is also claimed that summers are trending hotter, and extreme heat waves are more frequent.

Beginning with drought, Oregon has not been suffering from more severe droughts over time. According to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, there is no indication that droughts in Oregon are worse today than they were 100+ years of warming ago. (See Figure below)

In fact, the worst droughts seem to have occurred in the 1970s and 1930s. D4 drought conditions – the most severe, are less frequent and widespread this decade than they were during those periods.

From the year 2000 to present, it’s even less alarming. Oregon only experienced severe drought for a few months in in three years out of the past 24, in 2004, and 2021-2022, but even then, the droughts covered less than a one-third of the state. Currently, 24 percent of the state is experiencing “moderate drought.”

This comports well with much of the data discussed for the United States in general in Climate at a Glance: Drought, which explains that the United States has actually seen fewer droughts over time as the climate modestly warms.

The reasoning for this is partially admitted by the article when OPB says that more precipitation is falling “as rain instead of snow.” This language is ripped directly from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information State Climate Summaries (NCEIS); however, the Oregon summary page merely says that more precipitation “is expected to fall as rain instead of snow,” not that it already is. No data indicates that snowfall has declined or is trending downward in recent years or decades, rather the NCEIS merely asserts that winter precipitation is expected to increase. Whether, in fact, precipitation will actually increase, and if it does, whether it will fall as snow or rain, is unknown and unknowable at the present.

National trends suggest that snowfall is decreasing slightly in late spring, but this doesn’t seem to be the case for Oregon as of yet, looking at data from the US Department of Agriculture National Water and Climate Center. (See figure below)

Figure 1: Stacked elements are months of each year, focused on Feb, Mar, Apr, and May.

In fact, according to USDA data, which extends back to 1981, Oregon set its record for April snow-water equivalent in 2022, and second highest year was recorded in 2023.

Regarding wildfires, again, as Climate Realism has covered many times, U.S. wildfires are not getting worse, nor are they getting worse in Oregon.

According to the Oregon Department of Forestry data, except for two exceptional years in 2020 and 2021, when there was a drought, Oregon has not seen an increase in the acres burned in wildfires. (See figure below)

Heatwaves are likewise not getting worse in Oregon, at least not consistently. The NCEIS reports that, while the number of extremely hot (over 100°F) days in Oregon were above average since the late 1980s, reaching peaks in 2005-2009 and 2015-2020, “the number was well below average during the 2010–2014 period,” showing that there is a more complicated trend than a gradual march towards statewide eternal heat syncope. 2023 was likewise below average.

OPB claims that things are so bad for farmers that there is a need for “workshops and training to help food producers identify and define feelings like climate stress or grief and to find both emotional and agricultural ways to cope.” But neither the long-term weather nor crop production trends support the idea that climate change is killing agriculture in Oregon. As a result, there is seemingly little need to identify anxiety over seasonal crop failures as “climate grief.”

One of the examples of farm problems cited in OPB’s article was that of a hazelnut farmer losing his trees to frost. Yet, that one farmer’s experience is not representative of hazelnut production for Oregon as a whole. In fact, Oregon is the country’s top hazelnut producer. And, according to USDA data, hazelnut production in Oregon has exploded 149 percent since 1999. (See the Figure)

This example illustrates that anecdotal stories about the woes of a single or a few climate-concerned farmers is not a good metric for judging the state of agricultural production in the state.

OPB should stick to the facts instead of attempting to leverage the fears of farmers about crop losses into a climate story, and so should the organizers of so-called “Climate Stress and Grief” groups and seminars. Taking advantage of people whose livelihoods do depend on the weather by promoting unwarranted climate fears may make for good headlines and generate some income, but it is as wrong as efforts to ban the fossil fuel use, when fossil fuels make adaptation to, resilience in the face of, and recovery from extreme weather possible.

Sea Level Rise Is Causing Longer Days?

It’s models all the way down. There’s no way to measure fractions of milliseconds per century (ms/cy) changes in the length of day (LOD) over any time period, much less at a centennial to decadal scale. Might as well try to determine “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

From Watts Up With That?

Guest “I couldn’t make this sort of schist up, even if I was trying” by David Middleton

‘Unprecedented’ Sea Level Rise Is Making Earth’s Days Longer

Published Jul 15, 2024 at 3:00 PM EDT

By Jess Thomson

Science Reporter

Our changing climate is impacting our planet in a huge number of ways—ranging from powerful hurricanes and intense droughts to invasive species and ocean acidification—but there might be another bizarre effect that you’ve never heard of.

Climate change might actually be slowly changing the length of a day on Earth, according to a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This is a result of sea levels rising—because of increased temperatures and the melting of the polar ice caps—thereby causing a redistribution of mass from the poles of our planet toward the equator.

[…]Newsweek

Newsweek? They’re still in business?

Newsweek, April 28, 1975

The PNAS article is pay-walled. However, the abstract says it all…

Abstract

The melting of ice sheets and global glaciers results in sea-level rise, a pole-to-equator mass transport increasing Earth’s oblateness and resulting in an increase in the length of day (LOD). Here, we use observations and reconstructions of mass variations at the Earth’s surface since 1900 to show that the climate-induced LOD trend hovered between 0.3 and 1.0 ms/cy in the 20th century, but has accelerated to 1.33 ± 0.03 ms/cy since 2000. We further show that surface mass transport fully explains the accelerating trend in the Earth oblateness observed in the past three decades. We derive an independent measure of the decreasing LOD trend induced by Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) of −0.80 ± 0.10 ms/cy, which provides a constraint for the mantle viscosity. The sum of this GIA rate and lunar tidal friction fully explains the secular LOD trend that is inferred from the eclipse record in the past three millennia prior to the onset of contemporary climate change. Projections of future climate warming under high emission scenarios suggest that the climate-induced LOD rate may reach 2.62 ± 0.79 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tidal friction as the single most important contributor to the long-term LOD variations.PNAS

It’s models all the way down. There’s no way to measure fractions of milliseconds per century (ms/cy) changes in the length of day (LOD) over any time period, much less at a centennial to decadal scale. Might as well try to determine “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

The LOD has been generally increasing over geologic time (Mitchell & Kirscher, 2023). As the Earth has pushed the Moon farther away, the Earth’s rotation has slowed down.

1.33 ms/cy = 0.0000133 s/yr

At a rate of 0.0000133 seconds per year, in 80 million years, the sidereal day will be 18 minutes longer than it currently is.

Back in the Cretaceous Period (~80 mya), when sea level was much higher than it is today and there was little to no polar ice, the days were about 23.5 hours long (de Winter et al., 2020). The rate of LOD change from 80 mya to present (1950 AD) was about 2.25 ms/cy.

Figure 7 from de Winter et al., 2020

Allow this to sink in: The rate of LOD change from 80 mya to 1950 AD was about +2.25 ms/cy. The rate of LOD change since 2000 AD, allegedly driven by “‘unprecedented’ sea level rise is only +1.33 ms/cy.

Of course, there are no Cretaceous measurements of LOD. This is based on reconstructions from rudist shells and models… And the error bars are in days and hours… not milliseconds.

Measuring LOD

Current LOD can be directly measured very precisely. Schreiber et al., 2023 employed “a laser ring gyroscope” to measure changes in the sidereal day. They found that the LOD fluctuated by as much as 6 ms over the 120-day measurement period.

If LOD fluctuates by 6 ms over a two month period a 1.33 ± 0.03 ms/century increase in the LOD is about as relevant as a 1-3 mm/yr rate of sea level rise is to a 1 meter daily tidal range.

References

de Winter, N.J., Goderis, S., Van Malderen, S.J.M., Sinnesael, M., Vansteenberge, S., Snoeck, C., Belza, J., Vanhaecke, F. and Claeys, P. (2020), Subdaily-Scale Chemical Variability in a Torreites Sanchezi Rudist Shell: Implications for Rudist Paleobiology and the Cretaceous Day-Night Cycle. Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology, 35: e2019PA003723. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003723

Mitchell, R.N., Kirscher, U. Mid-Proterozoic day length stalled by tidal resonance. Nat. Geosci. 16, 567–569 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01202-6

Schreiber, K.U., Kodet, J., Hugentobler, U. et al. Variations in the Earth’s rotation rate measured with a ring laser interferometer. Nat. Photon. 17, 1054–1058 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-023-01286-x

Shahvandi MK, Adhikari S, Dumberry M, Mishra S, Soja B. The increasingly dominant role of climate change on length of day variations. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024 Jul 23;121(30):e2406930121. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2406930121. Epub 2024 Jul 15. PMID: 39008671.

The Titanic scale of floating wind turbines quantified

My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.

From CFACT

By David Wojick

My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies. They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.

Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.

Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.

See https://www.oedigital.com/news/504812-addressing-the-challenges-of-developing-floating-wind-at-scale

And https://www.oedigital.com/news/514835-preparing-for-floating-wind-leveraging-the-oil-gas-supply-chain

Of course, these are just estimates based on proposed designs, not measurements. Keep in mind that no one, anywhere, has ever built one of these Titanic monsters. Governments are setting huge targets for a technology that does not exist.

Based on UK permit applications, we are looking at a colossal individual floater footprint of around 160,000 square feet. That is roughly three football fields, so a mighty big float. And the UK does not get anything like hurricane-force winds. Maybe 100 mph, but never 160.

Weight-wise, Lewis suggests up to 5,000 tons of steel or 20,000 tons of concrete per float. Mind you, 5,000 tons of steel floaters will not keep 2,000 tons on a tall pole upright. These designs are what are called “semi-submersible”. This means the Titanic float is something like half full of water. There is enough air to float it but also a lot of water to hopefully weigh it down. I have yet to see the math on all this and have my doubts about its viability, but this is what is reported.

Of course, these huge floaters make floating wind power extremely expensive. The guess is at least three times as much as the already ridiculously expensive fixed-bottom offshore wind power. It could be a lot more.

These enormous numbers are based on 15 MW turbines, which are the biggest built today, although none has yet been installed and operational offshore. But bigger are coming with 18 MW on order and 20 MW advertised. Floater size and weight scale exponentially with turbine weight and height, so the above huge numbers may actually be quite small.

As an engineer, I would build a few of these monster floating assemblies and run them through a few hurricanes to see how they did, especially if they survived. Of course, the hell-bent Biden folks and green States are doing nothing like that.

For example, next month, Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is selling 15,000 MW of floating wind leases in the Gulf of Maine. California just announced a 25,000 MW floating wind target with 5,000 MW already leased by BOEM.

Just to play with numbers, this 40,000 MW of floaters would take just under 3,000 of these monster 15 MW floaters. In addition to filling up a lot of surface ocean, each has to be anchored to the sea floor with at least three mooring cables, more likely around eight each. Plus each has a live wire cable transmitting its energy output.

Lewis says the depths involved are like this: “In the U.S., the first commercial-scale projects will be off California (500-1,300 meters). Future activity is planned off Oregon (550-1,500 meters), the Gulf of Maine (190-300 meters), and the Central Atlantic (over 2,000 meters).” A mile is roughly 1,600 meters.

So we have many millions of feet of mooring cables and hot wires filling the ocean between the floaters and the sea floor. This is a whole new form of harassment that needs to be authorized (or not) under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

What is really funny is I see no plans for building these thousands of Titanic floating wind assemblies. I recently pointed out that the Biden Transportation Dept was illegally diverting almost a billion dollars to build floating wind fabrication facilities in Maine and California. But, neither facility design has what it would take to actually make this stupendous semi-submersible junk, starting with dry docks.

I strongly suggest we put a big hold on leasing and funding floating wind technology. Let’s first see how and if it works and at what cost.

The Government-Imposed Cost of Electricity in Texas

“Government increased the cost of Texas electricity by $20 Billion in 2023.”

From Master Resource

By Bill Peacock

“Government increased the cost of Texas electricity by $20 Billion in 2023.”

On July 1, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced that they “will seek to expand the [Texas Energy Fund] to $10 billion to build more new [generation] plants as soon as possible.” The Texas Legislature, with voter approval, created the Fund last year with initial funding of $5 billion.

Subsidizing multi-billion dollar generators and electric utilities using Texans’ money is nothing new in Texas. Figure 1 shows that in 2023 the U.S. government, Texas’ state government, and Texas local governments increased the cost of electricity in the Texas area served by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) by $19.9 billion, most of it by providing subsidies and benefits to generators and transmission companies. This represented 42.7% of the total cost of electricity to Texans in ERCOT. Over the last 10 years, the total government imposed cost (GIC) of electricity in ERCOT was $84.3 billion. Of that amount, Texas state and local governments are responsible for 85.7% of the total.

How did it happen that more than 40% of Texans’ electricity costs are imposed on them by government? The answer is simple: Texas policymakers supported ever increasing subsidies for renewable energy even as renewables were degrading the reliability of the Texas grid. When the reliability problem caused by renewable subsidies became so apparent to the public that it could no longer be ignored—think Winter Storm Uri, policymakers decided to throw more taxpayer dollars at all generation sources rather than end renewable subsidies. Apparently, it is more beneficial politically to take money from constituents than to challenge the renewable energy lobby.

The only solution to the current insanity of increasing energy subsidies in an attempt to address the harm being done by renewable energy subsidies is to eliminate all of the subsidies.

The Government-Imposed Cost of Texas Electricity

Only a decade ago, Texas had the most competitive electricity market in the world, a market that produced reliable, affordable electricity. Today, the Texas electric grid has been taken over by Texas government. This has produced predictable results: reliability has plummeted while costs have skyrocketed. The latest data show April electricity residential prices at 14.57 cents per kilowatt hour, up 23% over the last three years.

As bad as they are, retail electricity prices do not immediately reflect all the costs. Figure 2 shows 2019 as the pivot point in the takeover of the electricity market. That was the year that the government-imposed cost of electricity doubled from $4.3 billion to $8.9 billion, primarily because the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUC) made adjustments to the Operating Reserve Demand Curve (ORDC) that increased wholesale electricity prices by $3 billion. Then Uri brought another increase. For the five years prior to 2019, government-imposed costs totaled $14.7 billion. Over the last five years, they totaled $69.6 billion, 32.7% of the total cost of electricity. Most of it paid for by Texans.

Wholesale electricity prices confirm that these costs have been passed along to Texas businesses and consumers. In the five years prior to 2019, wholesale prices averaged $31.18 per megawatt hour. Since then, prices averaged $76.14. The costs translate into higher energy prices, higher general prices, higher taxes, lower wages, and lower profits for Texans. Except for wages and profits in the energy industry.

Prior to 2019, renewable energy subsidies had always been the largest government-imposed cost. That is no longer the case. Figure 3 shows that renewable subsidies totaled $4 billion in 2023, but the other government-imposed costs, $15.9 billion, were almost four times that of renewables.

Most of the non-renewable government-imposed costs were negligible or did not exist until recently. Uplift costs were negligible prior to 2014. Ancillary Services have tripled since 2014. The ORDC and the Reliability Adder came online in 2014 and 2015, respectively. But it was not until 2019 that they had a significant effect on prices.

Until last year, the ORDC had by far the largest effect on electricity prices ($12.9 billion in added costs).  But in 2023, the newly created ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service (ECRS) overwhelmed the system, increasing wholesale electricity prices by an estimated $12 billion in one year.

Moving Forward

As long as Texas politicians are unwilling to address the harm being caused by renewable energy, the reliability of the Texas grid will continue to decrease over the next five years as costs increase.

Renewable energy subsidies have forced a radical transformation of the Texas grid over the last 10 years. In 2014, natural gas, coal, and nuclear (thermal generation) made up 86% of the generation capacity in ERCOT. Wind was 13% of capacity, solar less than 0.5%. In 2024, thermal generation comprises only 58% of generating capacity. Renewables now make up 38%: wind 25% and solar 13%. It is incredibly complex, difficult, and expensive to maintain the reliability of the Texas electric grid when almost 40% of the installed capacity is intermittent, i.e., cannot be counted on to be available when needed. Battery storage, now at 4% of grid capacity, will never be able to compensate for this.

It appears the explosion of renewables will continue unabated despite the well-known fact that the reliability value of renewable energy declines as its grid penetration increases. From 2025 to 2029, ERCOT expects only 1,074 megawatts of new non-renewable generation. Wind generation, though, is expected to increase by 3,628 megawatts, solar by 36,868 megawatts, and battery storage by 18,158 megawatts. This forecast means that renewables (including batteries) would total 59% of generating capacity by 2029. While the Texas Energy Fund may increase new generation from natural gas, it will not stop the growth of renewables and the harm they are causing to the reliability of the grid.

This explains why Texas policymakers are desperate to do something to counter the growth of renewables. It does not explain, however, why they continue to take money from Texas taxpayers and consumers and give it to big businesses. The mechanisms being used to deliver the largest amount of the new subsidies are the ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service and the Texas Energy Fund. Together, we estimate that these two subsidies will cost Texans at least $4.6 billion annually over the next six years. Figure 4 shows that the government imposed costs are expected to add at least $69.9 billion to the cost of electricity in ERCOT from 2024-28. Renewable subsidies and benefits will comprise $29.2 billion of that and subsidies and benefits for all energy sources make up the other $40.7 billion.

Conclusion

The only solution to the current insanity of increasing energy subsidies in an attempt to address the harm being done by renewable energy subsidies is to eliminate all of the subsidies. The Texas Legislature and the PUC could end all state energy subsidies by 2026. These subsidies are the ECRS, the Texas Energy Fund, the ORDC, the Reliability Adder, most Ancillary Services, and Chapters 312 and 313 tax abatements. Additionally, the PUC and the Legislature could require all energy companies to start paying for the costs they create on the grid that are currently socialized (paid by consumers): transmission lines (including CREZ lines), interconnection costs, renewable congestion costs, and the cost of building new generation and storage to address the reliability problems caused by the intermittency of wind and solar generation. This would be difficult, but the end result would be an electric grid with much less complexity and lower costs for Texans. This will only happen, though, if Texas policymakers are willing to put the interests of Texans ahead of the interests of the green energy industry.

Appendix: Explanation of Subsidies and Sources

Total Cost of Electricity. This is the total revenue from sales of electricity to end users in Texas reduced by 10% to reflect the load in ERCOT, then increased by the cost of federal & state tax subsidies (see below). Source: U.S. EIA.

Production Tax Credit. This is a federal subsidy for wind generation. It is expected to average $2.3 billion annually in Texas from 2024-28. Source: The Joint Committee on Taxation, U.S. Congress.

Investment Tax Credit. This is a federal subsidy for solar generation. It is expected to average $1.7 billion annually in Texas from 2024-28. Source: The Joint Committee on Taxation, U.S. Congress.

Other Federal Wind and Solar Subsidies. These were federal subsidies provided through various laws from 2006 through 2019. They totaled $12.4 billion. Sources: the U.S. Dept of Treasury and the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Renewable Energy Credits. These were subsidies mandated by the Texas Legislature from 2001 through 2023. The total estimated cost of the credits was $623.4 million. Source: ERCOT.

Chapters 312 and 313 Property Tax Abatements. These are for wind and solar generators. Chapter 313 has been abolished, but the costs will continue through 2032. Average annual cost: $454 million. Source: Texas Comptroller.

Competitive Renewable Energy Zone Transmission Lines. CREZ lines were mandated by the Texas Legislature in 2005 to provide transmission for wind generation from West Texas; they would not have been built under normal PUC protocols. Their total cost through 2029 is projected to be $13.3 billion. Average annual cost: $620 million. Source: The Energy Alliance.

Grid Interconnection. The cost of generators connecting to the Texas grid are subsidized by Texas consumers. From 2007 through 2021, this cost was $1.1 billion. Source: Public Utility Commission of Texas.

Renewable Congestion. Renewable energy creates congestion when the wind increases and electricity from turbines floods transmission lines. Average annual cost: $498 million. Source: Potomac Economics.

Operating Reserve Demand Curve (ORDC). This was created by the PUC in 2013. Allegedly created to address market failure, the problems were actually caused by renewable energy and state regulations. Average annual cost: $2.3 billion. Source: Potomac Economics.

Uplift. This charge to consumers contains a variety of non-market costs, notably an administrative fee that pays for the cost of ERCOT. Average annual cost: $366 million. Source: Potomac Economics.

Reliability Adder. This is supposed to compensate for price-suppressing effects of out-of-market reliability actions taken by ERCOT. Average annual cost: $2.2 billion. Source: Potomac Economics.

Ancillary Services. These are mainly operating reserves that can start up and produce energy in a short period of time. This is a faulty market intervention based on the false assumption that the market would overcharge for the reserves. Average annual Cost: $1.1 billion. Source: Potomac Economics.

Uri Securitization. The PUC’s irrational and illegal increase of electricity prices during Uri costs consumers billions. At least $11.5 billion of these costs have been securitized to spread out the cost over time. Average annual cost: $738 million. Sources: Robert Bryce and other sources.

ERCOT Contingency Reserve Service. The ECRS increases wholesale prices by creating artificial shortages. Projected average annual cost: at least $3 billion. Source: Potomac Economics.

Texas Energy Fund. Created by the Texas Legislature in 2023, using $5 billion of surplus funds. Another $5 billion is expected to be added in 2025. Projected average annual cost: $1.6 billion. Source: Texas House Bill 1 (Sec. 18.75).

______

Bill Peacock is the policy director of the Energy Alliance. The Energy Alliance (www.theenergyalliance.com) is a project of the Texas Business Coalition to raise awareness of issues about the energy market that matter the most to consumers: Reliability, Affordability, and Efficiency.

An unusually warm year or two cannot be blamed on climate change

Anything different from that small 0.02 deg. C per year warming is due to natural climate variability.

From Roy Spencer, PhD

July 17th, 2024 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

NOAA Climate Data Assimilation System (CDAS) July 2024 surface air temperature departures from 30-year normals, as of July 17, 2024 (graphic courtesy of Weatherbell.com).

That title might trigger some people, so let me explain. Yes, in a warming world due to increasing CO2 there will be a statistical increase in “unusually warm” years. But assuming the warming is entirely due to steadily increasing CO2 causing a slight (currently ~1%) energy imbalance in the climate system, then the warming that results is about ~0.02 deg. C per year.

Anything different from that small 0.02 deg. C per year warming is due to natural climate variability.

This can be easily demonstrated with a simple 1D energy balance model. Anything different is due to natural weather and climate variability.

If we take our UAH global lower tropospheric temperature product as an example, 2023 was a whopping +0.51 deg. C above the 1991-2020 average. Using our trend of +0.14 deg. C per decade as a warming rate baseline, then 2023 should have been +0.25 deg. C above the baseline, but instead it was twice as warm as that. So, about half that warmth was natural (AGAIN… assuming the background warming trend is 100% due to humans).

So, when we get a really warm year (like 2023, and probably 2024) then something other than CO2 is mostly to blame. All of the media and environmentalist hype is just noise. Really warm years will be offset by cooler years (which no one reports on because it’s not newsworthy) so that the long term temperature trends remains ~0.02 deg C per year of warming (+0.014 deg C per year in our satellite data).

Again, this assumes CO2 is 100% to blame for the long-term warming trend, and the 0.02 value assumes a climate sensitivity on the low end of IPCC projections, which is consistent with observations-based diagnoses of climate sensitivity; change it to 0.03 if you want, my point still stands.

It’s really that simple.

Angry Birds!  Really….

Briefly … the birds are ANGRY! They are attacking. They are mobbing. They are swooping. There have been “swarming incidents”.

News Brief by Kip Hansen

Briefly …  the birds are ANGRY!  They are attacking.  They are mobbing.  They are swooping.  There have been “swarming incidents”.

This is not The Onion.   This is serious.  Here’s the latest from your ever-dependable New York Times:  Angry Birds Take on Drones at New York City Beach.   If you need verification, you can check-in with the Associated Press:  On NYC beaches, angry birds fight drones patrolling for sharks and struggling swimmers.

The scoop: 

”One is a distinctive shorebird, slightly smaller than an average sea gull, with a bright orange bill that pries open clams, oysters and other shellfish. The other is a remote-controlled gadget with rotating blades.

In the skies above Rockaway Beach in Queens, bird and drone are not, it seems, coexisting in harmony.

Just as New Yorkers flock to the beach to escape the sweltering summer heat, American Oystercatchers have taken to attacking a fleet of drones deployed by city officials to scan for sharks and swimmers in distress.

The aerial conflict between animal and machine is raising concerns about the safety of the shorebirds, as they aggressively pursue the buzzing drones in defense of their nests, city officials and bird experts said.”  [NY Times]

The AP confirms the aerial battles: 

”A fleet of drones patrolling New York City’s beaches for signs of sharks and struggling swimmers is drawing backlash from an aggressive group of seaside residents: local shorebirds.

Since the drones began flying in May, flocks of birds have repeatedly swarmed the devices, forcing the police department and other city agencies to adjust their flight plans. While the attacks have slowed, they have not stopped completely, fueling concern from wildlife experts about the impact on threatened species nesting along the coast.

Veronica Welsh, a wildlife coordinator at the Parks Department, said the birds were “very annoyed by the drones” from the moment they arrived on the beach.

“They will fly at it, they’ll swoop at it, they’ll be vocalizing,” Welsh said. “They think they’re defending their chicks from a predator.”

It’s the oystercatchers, you see.  They nest on the shores of Long Island Sound and up around the coast to the north and east on the sandy shores of Rhode Island and Massachusetts, including Cape Cod.  They do not like to disturbed.  We are told they are “very annoyed by the drones”. [A fact, I believe, credited by Veronica Welsh to “personal communication”.]

“When an Oystercatcher spots a drone, it will typically fly alongside the machine and emit a loud, shrill call or try to strike the drone with its feet, said Shiloh Schulte, an ornithologist and coordinator of the American Oystercatcher Recovery Program at Manomet, a bird conservation organization.” [NY Times]

Now, you don’t suppose that those oystercatchers are actually nesting on the crowded beaches of NY City, do you?  Of course not, that would be stupid.   But, nonetheless,  they are nesting right out in the open on beaches that are frequented by another common species:  humans. 

There we see a happy oystercatcher sitting on its nest on Hempstead Beach, there is a lifeguard lookout just 50 feet away.

“City officials said the “swarming incidents” have been primarily carried out by American oystercatchers. The shorebird, known for its striking orange bill, lays its eggs this time of year in the sand on Rockaway Beach. While its population has improved in recent decades, federal authorities consider the species a “high conservation concern.” [AP]

The federal authority considering oystercatchers of “high conservation concern” is the National Park Service, based on the U.S. Shorebird Conservation Plan.  

The sign in the photo above says “Endangered Birds” but oystercatchers are not pictured on it:  oystercatchers may choose stupid nesting sites, but they are not Endangered, they are not Threatened, they are not even Near Threatened, even if the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is concerned.   They are, according to the IUCN Red List Least Concern.  The more protective Partners in Flight lists the American Oystercatcher on their Yellow Watch List based on Restricted Breed Range.

All the hullabaloo is based on the fears of bird conservation groups and city/state conservation officials:

“…Katrina Toal, deputy director of the wildlife unit at the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. “The danger is to the birds, of course. They could strike the drone, injuring themselves.”

Thankfully….”No birds have been harmed, but officials say there have been several close calls.”

Apparently, none of the fabulously expensive life-saving drones carrying life rafts to be dropped to people drowning and live video cameras watching for sharks so that lifeguards can to alert swimmers and get them out of the water have “been harmed” either. 

And that’s the latest news from  ♫♬ Rockaway Beach….♬♫.

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Author’s Comment:

The news stories are interesting in regards to drones capable of carrying life rafts that can be dropped to struggling swimmers and live video that can alerts lifeguards to the presence of sharks in the water.

The worries about “What if a bird harms itself?” are, in my never-humble opinion, just plain silly.   The drone operators have already moved their drone-ports (launch and landing sites) away from known nesting sites, almost entirely eliminating the possible conflicts.  Still, birds will be birds, and birds will mob any threats flying near their nests [3 minute YouTube]. 

I recently witnessed small birds mobbing a snake in my yard. The snake involved was a corn snake which are know to eat nestling birds.

Overall, vastly misplaced priorities which are often seen today in environmental and conservations circles.

Thanks for reading.

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NOAA’s June 2024 Climate Data Shows No “Record High” U.S. Maximum Temperature Anomaly as Portrayed in Media Hype 

NOAA has updated its Contiguous U.S. climate temperature anomaly and absolute temperature measurement data results through June 2024 with these results showing that the temperatures experienced this June were not “record” high outcomes as falsely portrayed by the climate alarmist media’s phony political campaign hype.

From ClimateRealism

Editor’s Note:  The mainstream media has posted dozens if not hundreds of stories touting claims that a record breaking heatwave is hammering parts of the United States so far this summer, which the media links to climate change, see, for example stories from Reuters, Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Climate Realism has previously debunked this latest round of record setting heat wave claims,  here and here. This article from Larry Hamlin, originally published at WUWT, Delves into the details of the claims when ClimateRealism summarized June in their monthly fact check report.

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

A recent ClimateRealism Fact-Check for June 2024 article addressed the climate science data unsupported claims by  climate alarmist media that hyped phony temperature “records” (shown below) have occurred in June across the U.S. which the article establishes as being completely false.

NOAA has updated its Contiguous U.S. climate temperature anomaly and absolute temperature measurement data results through June 2024 with these results showing that the temperatures experienced this June were not “record” high outcomes as falsely portrayed by the climate alarmist media’s phony political campaign hype.

NOAA‘s June 2024 Contiguous U.S. USCRN maximum temperature anomaly data (shown below) clearly indicates that not only is there no established trend of increasing maximum temperature anomalies during the period starting in 2005 but also the June 2024 anomaly value (2.84 degrees F highlighted in red) is below the prior highest June value of 3.91 degrees F in 2021 as well as far below the highest anomaly value ever recorded during this period of 7.72 degrees F that occurred in March 2012.

NOAA’s Contiguous U.S. maximum absolute temperature measured data for the month of June for the period 1895 through June 2024 (shown below) establishes that June 2024 (84.61degrees F highlighted in red) value is only the 6th highest measured June value with the highest June value occurring in June 1933 of 85.91 degrees F (as shown in the table).

Furthermore, NOAA’s Contiguous U.S maximum absolute temperatures measured for all months between 1895 and June 2024 (shown below) establishes that the June 2024 maximum measured absolute temperature is only the 1,340th highest measured temperature (84.61 degrees F shown in red) out of a total of 1540 measured maximum temperatures with the highest being July 1936 at 90.81 degrees F (as shown in the table).

Looking at NOAA’s California month of June maximum temperature data (shown below) from 1895 to June 2024 we see that the June 2024 high is only the 5th highest measured maximum temperature (88.8 degrees F shown in red) compared to the highest maximum temperature of 89.8 degrees F in June of 2021 (shown in the table).

Additionally, NOAA’s maximum measured temperature data for all 58 counties in California establishes that the June 2024 outcomes did not represent the maximum June temperatures for any of these 58 counties.

Furthermore, NOAA’s measured data for June 2024 for all 48 Contiguous U.S. states establishes that the June 2024 maximum measured temperatures were not the highest measured June temperatures for any of these 48 states with that also being true for the state of Alaska as well.         

Also, NOAA’s June 2024 temperature data for all 9 of its U.S. climate regions (shown below) establishes that none of these regions experienced a “record” high June month in year 2024.

Looking at NOAA’s measured California maximum temperatures for all months from 1895 through 2024 (shown below) we find that the June 2024 value (88.8 degrees F shown in red) is only the 1382nd highest out of a total of 1554 total maximum temperatures with the highest ever measured in July 1931 at 95.6 degrees F as shown in the table.

Additionally, NOAA’s June 2024 updated data establishes that record high June temperatures did not occur in the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco or Sacramento and that record all time high temperatures did not occur for any of NOAA’s 9 tracked California cities during June 2024.      

The climate alarmist media falsely hyped many dozens of phony “record” high June 2024 temperature stories across the country while NOAA’s official U.S. national, regional and state measured temperature data clearly established that these “record” claims are completely phony and represent dishonest and climate science incompetent media driven climate alarmist political propaganda.  

Former Obama Interior Secretary: “really afraid for the future of our planet” if President Trump Wins

… One of the biggest hurdles to getting to net zero is that consumers still aren’t paying for putting carbon in the atmosphere …”

Sally Jewell 

Essay by Eric Worrall

h/t Dr. Willie Soon; “… One of the biggest hurdles to getting to net zero is that consumers still aren’t paying for putting carbon in the atmosphere …”

Trump Return Could See Climate Progress ‘Unraveled,’ Sally Jewell Says

The former Interior secretary said she’s “terrified” about what a second Trump administration could mean for climate and environmental policy. 

By Zahra Hirji
12 July 2024 at 5:15 am AEST

Sally Jewell, who served as US Interior secretary from 2013 to 2017, said the climate stakes of the election in November “could not be higher” and that she’s “really afraid for the future of our planet” should former President Donald Trump return to the White House.

“To go backwards is not acceptable,” Jewell told attendees at the Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle on Thursday. “I can’t say enough about the importance of continuing the progress that has been made over the last three years” on climate change, she added, especially the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

…

One of the biggest hurdles to getting to net zero is that consumers still aren’t paying for putting carbon in the atmosphere, Jewell said. Economic incentives are needed: “Until we start shining a spotlight on the true impact, I don’t think people are going to begin to change their behaviors.”

…

“We are all part of an ecosystem that needs to work together,” she said. “We need to pull all those levers now, because it’s a five-alarm fire.”

…Read more: 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-11/trump-return-could-see-climate-progress-unraveled-sally-jewell-says

A former Democrat interior secretary suggesting to reporters that a second Trump presidency could endanger the future of the planet. What could possibly go wrong?

Go Vegan to stop blackouts: Climate Change causes Electricity Grid failure now

Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work
And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know.

From JoNova

By Jo Nova

Shh: The great Power Grid Necromancers are at work

And you thought Blackouts were caused by bad management, but really, it’s “Climate Change”. The poor grid managers now have to cope with floods, fires, heatwaves and a tenth-of-a-degree of warming every decade, you know. It’s not their fault. It’s not the Ministers fault. It’s not the fault of the solar power glut, or the wind drought, or the lack of spinning inertia, the dearth of despatchable power, or the byzantine complexity of managing a grid full of unreliable generators being randomly unreliable. The grid is not more fragile because we built 100,000 kilometers of long delicate high-voltage-interconnectors, swaying in the wind, and made of cheap imported steel because we can’t afford to make proper steel ourselves. No!

It’s your fault the blackouts are coming. You didn’t ride your bike, you didn’t eat tofu and crickets, you didn’t buy enough solar panels and you drove your car to work, you planet-monster. What did you expect?

Climate Change is coming for your electricity grid.

It took four writers, five advisors, several editors and probably buckets of money to write an obsequious article radiating nonsense. It’s like a form of mass hypnosis — training the serfs to blame Exxon, and forgive their inept, traitorous Grid Managers, for their incompetent blackouts.

The answer to every problem on Earth apparently, is to buy more solar panels, install more wind farms and use child slaves in the Congo so the weather will be perfect.

The excuse for every bureaucrat failure is “climate change”:

The World’s Power Grids are Failing as the Planet Warms

By Eamon Farhat, Misha Savic, Fiona MacDonald, and Mark Chediak, Bloomberg

The bad news for Martinovic and hundreds of millions of people around the world is that the risk of outages is getting worse. Hotter summers mean spikes in demand for cooling, as high temperatures cause wires to sag and risk sparking forest fires. Upgrades to power infrastructure haven’t kept pace, even as efforts to reduce use of fossil fuels make electricity distribution more crucial.

Millions of households in Houston suffered blackouts in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl last week, losing air conditioning as sweltering heat followed the storm. Hitting emerging and developed economies, outages from Ecuador to India in recent weeks offer a foretaste of coming disruption.

Unstable networks create instability for businesses, roil politics and threaten lives….

All those unreliable generators are making the grid more unreliable, so hurry, we need even more of them.

Pay us more money, pay everyone lots of money.

Global Power Grids Require Trillions of Investment

Expanding the grid will cost about $24.1 trillion to meet net-zero goals by 2050, outpacing the investment needed in renewable-power capacity, according to BloombergNEF.

“The whole power system was built and designed in one climatic era and now is being asked to work in a different climatic era,” said Michael Webber, a professor of energy at the University of Texas at Austin. “It just means more things can go wrong.”

The Earth is warming at 0.13°C every decade.  Plant “hardiness” zones are shifting by, hold your breath, 13 miles per decade. The permafrost line has shifted 80 miles north in Canada. Plants can move, you know, but high-voltage lines can’t. It’s so unfair.

If only expert climate models could have predicted this thirty years ago, so we could build power lines 50 miles north…

Most blackouts occur when big chunks of supply or demand come on or off suddenly. Damage from storms, a burst of renewable generation or spikes in usage can all cause outages where the network isn’t resilient enough.

Climate change affects power distribution in lots of ways. Extreme heat increases demand for cooling, while reducing the efficiency of solar panels, crimping supply. High temperatures can cause lines to sag and transformers to overheat, leading to equipment failing and increasing risks of fires.

So solar panels don’t work as well in hot weather when everyone needs their airconditioners on. I mean, who could have seen that coming, apart from a million material engineers?

It’s so unfair.

Storyline Attribution:  “Just so…” stories about Weather Events

Storyline Attribution of weather events is ubiquitous in the news stream: even your sports-crazed neighbor can tell you why we have “all this crazy weather”. He hears it every night on the weather news – cute little easy-to-remember “Just so” stories explaining it all to him, devoid of any science whatever. The same type of storylines are taught to your children everyday in their schools…

Storylines, Just So storylines, are very common in science today. Biology is full of them, theoretical physics too. The soft-sciences may be nothing but just-so storylines. Feel free to suggest examples….

From Watts Up With That?

Opinion by Kip Hansen

In the last decade or so, there has been an increasing effort to tie every strong or unusual weather event, no matter how local, to Global Climate Change.   This need arose from the inability of the IPCC and its thousands of contributors to actually find, “detect” is the word they use, the negative effects of Climate Change in the real world, despite over 40 years of endless dire predictions.

You may have seen this before, but I offer it as evidence of the above:

A few notes about AR6 WG1 Chapter 12 Table 12.12: 

1.  ONLY the middle column represents real information:  “Already Emerged In Historical Period”.  This means that the IPCC has failed to even to detect increases/decreases in all the other Climate Impact Drivers (see definition at end of essay) which have white boxes in that column.  You must ignore the  “Emerging by….” Columns – both are shown as “at Least for RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5” which is considered by many the now-impossible climate scenario. (and here).

2.  The darker colors in the Already Emerged  column indicate that the climate-impact driver has been detected with high confidence – but any numeral in the box is a caveat as to in what regions.  For instance, “Cold Spell” has been detected only in “Australia, Africa and most of Northern South America”.  Decreases in “Lake, river and sea ice” has been detected only for Arctic sea ice.

3.  It is interesting to read the list of things (white boxes across all three columns)  that are still not expected to be found even in 2100 RCP8.5 dystopia-land.   The majority of Climate-impact Drivers (19 out of 33) are not predicted to “emerge” by 2100 even under RCP8.5.  And yet, almost every day, there is a media story telling us that it is already happening and has been “caused by climate changed” or “intensified or made worse  by climate change” contrary to the IPCC’s AR6.

So, today I ask: 

Question:  “Why do we read that it has been determined by scientists that [some weather event]  was caused or made XX% worse by climate change?”

Answer:  Storyline Attribution.

And what might that be, you may ask?   Well, it is my opinion that Storyline Attribution is simply a “Just So…” story about the weather used by the climate gang to tie every weather story to global climate change somehow, anyhow.

Just-so story — “a speculative story or explanation of doubtful or unprovable validity that is put forward to account for the origin of something … when no verifiable explanation is known”

Pielke Jr. wrote last week, in Climate fueled extreme weather, Part 2::

“The last decade has seen the rise of what is called storyline attribution, which now dominates discussion of every extreme weather event.

A storyline provides a putative causal explanation for the incidence of a particular extreme event that just happened and explains why the event was worse than it otherwise would have been, absent the human influence.

For example, from just last week:

  • Oceans have been warming due to human influences, notably increases in greenhouse gases and a reduction in aerosols;
  • Warmer oceans are associated with stronger hurricanes;
  • Hurricane Beryl was an unusually strong hurricane for July;
  • Therefore, Hurricane Beryl is an example of how climate change results in an increasing number of strong hurricanes.

The recent flood? More moisture available. That drought? Less moisture available. A flood somewhere and a drought somewhere else? Wavy jet stream. Duh. Just connect the dots.

A seemingly plausible-sounding storyline for every event is easy to create. I say seemingly because the storyline approach is free to discount parts of the story that don’t advance the narrative, to change the story event by event, and to ignore events that didn’t happen or did not become extreme. A storyline is a story, not science.“

What kind of a story? A Just So…story.   Specifically:  “a speculative story or explanation of doubtful or unprovable validity that is put forward to account for the origin of something (such as a biological trait) when no verifiable explanation is known”.

In these cases,  a Just So Story about the origins, the cause, the probability of a specific weather event, mild or extreme.   In the quote from Pielke Jr. above, the four bullet points, in order, make up the storyline attribution.

Now, to be fair, there is allegedly a scientific version of storyline attribution.  It is detailed in a report for the U.S. Congress titled “Is That Climate Change? The Science of Extreme Event Attribution” [.pdf].  Here is what they say:

“Storyline Attribution Analysis

Research using storyline attribution is an analysis of causes:

It [the Storyline Approach] is a framing based on analysis of physical processes and is similar to an accident investigation…. The causal chain of factors leading to the event is first identified, and the role of each factor is assessed.

Researchers analyze atmospheric circulation and meteorological patterns using models and observational data to try to establish the factors that contributed to the event. This analysis includes determining linkages among factors. For example, a circulation pattern may contribute to extreme precipitation in a study area, and the increased water vapor in the air carried by the circulation may be linked to an area of increased sea surface temperature.

The next step is to estimate anthropogenic climate influence on the causes linked to the event— for example, the extent to which human influence may have affected sea surface temperatures, temperatures that, in turn, contributed to increased precipitation in an extreme event. An attribution statement can then be made about the degree of human influence on the causes of the event.”

How does this play out in the real world, with real world example of this “scientific”  Storyline Attribution?   The Congressional Research Service supplies an example a storyline (which fails to find human influence):

“Researchers studying the record-setting 2011 drought/heat wave in Texas used a combination of observational data and climate model simulations to examine specific factors that may have influenced the magnitude of the event. The researchers found that the “principal physical process” contributing to the drought/heat wave was the extreme and continuing lack of rainfall in the previous winter and spring. This rainfall deficit was in turn linked to changes in sea surface temperatures. As the associated sea surface temperatures were within the range of natural variability, the researchers did not find evidence of human influence in their analysis of this extreme event.” [Oops…-kh]

[The analysis referred to in the above paragraph is M. Hoerling et al., “Anatomy of an Extreme Event,” Journal of Climate, vol. 26, no. 9 (2013). Hoerling is a full analysis, and not just a storyline attribution.  It is what a proper attribution study should be, but not what is presented to the media by weather attribution groups today.]

Typical storyline attribution presented to the media, as Pileke Jr. points out, is something more like this in a piece from the Climate Crisis Propaganada outfit, Inside Climate News regarding Hurricane Beryl:

“Hurricanes are expected to intensify, he [Kerry Emanuel] said, as greenhouse gas emissions warm the atmosphere and ocean, supercharging evaporation and heat transfer in a warmer atmosphere that already holds more moisture.

“A demonstrable greenhouse gas effect is the proportion of hurricanes that turn out cat 3 or 4,” Emanuel said. 

When Hurricane Beryl formed in the Atlantic in early July, hundreds of miles from the Texas coast, it reached category 4 status–the earliest category 4 storm on record. Record warm temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean this year have led to predictions of a highly active hurricane season.“

In the storyline attribution the public sees and hears on a daily basis, there simply is not any scientific analysis at all, just a storyline…just a story…a Just So story.   [see real hurricane data detailed, for instance, here.]

And the root of all good propaganda is a good believable story – believable because it is built around a little nugget of truth.  You can count those little nuggets in the storyline above:

1.  “Hurricanes are expected to intensify” – a meme of  climate crisis prediction, so, yes, “expected” by them

2.  The ubiquitous, “warmer atmosphere … holds more moisture.” A trivially true scientific fact.

3.  A fact “earliest Cat 4 storm in record” [this is as “as far as we know…”-type fact] and tied to predictions of a highly active hurricane season.

The actual event is Hurricane Beryl, a Cat 1 hurricane coming ashore at Houston, Texas.   The storyline paints the event as “intensified” by warmer air/warmer sea water and part of an [non-existent] increasing proportion of Cat 3 and 4 hurricanes caused by greenhouse gases.

And thus it was, they say, Just So….

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Author’s Comment:

Storyline Attribution of weather events is ubiquitous in the news stream: even your sports-crazed neighbor can tell you why we have “all this crazy weather”.  He hears it every night on the weather news – cute little easy-to-remember “Just so” stories explaining it all to him, devoid of any science whatever.  The same type of storylines are taught to your children everyday in their schools…

Storylines, Just So storylines, are very common in science today. Biology is full of them, theoretical physics too. The soft-sciences may be nothing but just-so storylines. Feel free to suggest examples….

Thanks for reading.

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NOTE:  Opinion essays, sometimes called OpEds, express the opinion(s) of their author.  Not the opinion of the newspaper, news agency, radio station or their owners; in this case, not the opinion(s) of WUWT as an entity, its owner Anthony Watts, or any of its associated staff and/or other contributors.  This Opinion Essay is written by Kip Hansen and I am happy to own these opinions in their entirety.

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As promised, here is the Definition of a Climate Impact Driver from IPCC AR6, the subject of the chart far above:

FAQ 12.1 | What Is a Climatic Impact-driver (CID)?

A climatic impact-driver is a physical climate condition that directly affects society or ecosystems. Climatic impact-drivers may represent a long-term average condition (such as the average winter temperatures that affect indoor heating requirements), a common event (such as a frost that kills off warm-season plants), or an extreme event (such as a coastal flood that destroys homes). A single climatic impact-driver may lead to detrimental effects for one part of society while benefiting another, while others are not affected at all. A climatic impact-driver (or its change caused by climate change) is therefore not universally hazardous or beneficial, but we refer to it as a ‘hazard’ when experts determine it is detrimental to a specific system.

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