Wind power fades before it even starts

23 March, 2012 by

Fitting end?

Wind power sums up green stupidity: it’s expensive, inefficient and ugly. And those are just the good points. It’s also utterly useless.

As such it is a perfect monument to the Greens – in a few years time the turbines will be silent, rusting away, unloved, past their sell-by date, and abandoned.

Yesterday, Bjørn Lomborg wrote in The Australian:

The use of wind turbines has increased tenfold during the past decade, with wind power often touted as the most cost-effective green opportunity. According to Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s Commissioner for Climate Action, “People should believe that (wind power) is very, very cheap.”

In fact, this is a highly problematic claim. While wind energy is cheaper than other, more ineffective renewables, such as solar, tidal, and ethanol, it is nowhere near competitive. If it were, we wouldn’t have to keep spending significant sums to subsidise it. (source)

And earlier this month, the Global Warming Policy Foundation released a scathing report on the state of wind energy in the UK:

One of the UK’s leading energy and environment economists warns that wind power is an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of reducing CO2 emissions. In fact, there is a significant risk that annual CO2 emissions could be greater as a result of Britain’s flawed wind policies when compared with the option of investing in efficient and flexible gas combined cycle plants.

…

“The key problems with current policies for wind power are simple. They require a huge commitment of investment resources to a technology that is not very green, in the sense of saving a lot of CO2, but which is certainly very expensive and inflexible. Unless the current Government scales back its commitment to wind power very substantially, its policy will be worse than a mistake, it will be a blunder.” (source)

And the UK Daily Mail reports on the rusting wind farms on Hawaii (pictured):

If any spot was tailor-made for a wind farm it would surely be here. The gales are so strong and relentless on the tip of South Point that trees grow almost horizontally. 

Yet the 27-year-old Kamaoa Wind Farm remains a relic of the boom and inglorious bust of America’s so-called ‘wind rush’, the world’s first major experiment in wind energy.

At a time when the EU and the British Government are fully paid-up evangelists for wind power, the lesson from America — and the ghostly hulks on this far-flung coast — should be a warning of their folly. (source)

But no one’s listening. The mad dash to cover the landscape with wind turbines is a result not of careful consideration, but naive environmental ideology. And now Australian industry is suffering as a result:

STALLED investment in renewable energy has forced the country’s largest wind farm tower manufacturer to seek voluntary redundancies from up to 100 of its 450 staff.

Keppel Prince, based in Portland, in southwest Victoria, has experienced a drop in demand for wind farms while the other core part of its business, maintenance of Alcoa’s local aluminium smelter, is also suffering. 

General manager Steve Garner said the wind farm work would dry up in the next two months as production finished for the 140-turbine Macarthur wind farm and a smaller 13-turbine project.

“The wind energy industry’s promise of ‘project, project, project’ just hasn’t materialised,” he said. “There are just so many projects that are still in a state of limbo waiting to try and secure funding.”

The optimism of green energy companies has dimmed since the carbon tax legislation was passed last year, amid political uncertainty and growing concern over the forthcoming review of the 20 per cent by 2020 renewable energy target. The oversupply of renewable energy certificates has also held electricity retailers back from new investment. (source)

The unpalatable reality is that all renewable energy sources available at the moment are hideously uncompetitive and require massive government subsidies. If just a few percent of the billions (trillions?) wasted on climate mitigation globally were directed towards intensive research for genuinely effective and inexpensive renewable energy, we might make some progress (hint: it isn’t wind, solar, geothermal…)

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India joins China in boycotting EU's aviation blackmail

23 March, 2012 by

Carbon price down 7%

China has already rejected the EU’s carbon blackmail, and now the Indian government has done the same. Not only is the EU in danger of starting a global trade war, but repercussions are widening, as China cancels a $14bn order with European aircraft manufacturer Airbus.

And all for what? To prop up the EU’s pointless emissions trading scheme which will do virtually nothing for the climate, and everything to damage Europe’s competitiveness. Even Reuters, in the article below, acknowledges that the carbon price in the EU is too low to encourage any low-carbon investment. What a joke.

NEW DELHI, March 22 (Reuters) – India joined China in asking its airlines to boycott the European Union’s carbon scheme on Thursday, confirming what a senior Indian government source previously told Reuters and stoking a diplomatic row over the issue.

“Though the European Union has directed Indian carriers to submit emissions details of their aircraft by March 31, 2012, no Indian carrier is submitting them in view of the position of the government,” India’s civil aviation minister Ajit Singh said on Thursday.

“Hence the imposition of a carbon tax does not arise,” Singh told lawmakers in a written reply.

The European Commission was not immediately available to comment. [LOL – Ed]

India’s opposition to the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS), a major plank in the bloc’s efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions and combat global warming, could damage the chances of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) it is negotiating with the EU.

On Monday, a senior government official told Reuters that India would ask local airlines not to buy carbon credits from or share emissions data with the bloc.

Since January this year, all airlines using EU airports start to become liable to pay for carbon emissions, but no carriers will be handed a bill until next year.

Initially, they will also be given free allowances to cover the bulk of the cost.

The March 31 deadline is one of a series for airlines to comply with various EU requirements. Documents seen by Reuters showed that airlines, including from India and China, have previously signed up to become eligible for free allowances.

SOVEREIGNTY

Foreign governments, including the world’s top three carbon emitters – the United States, China and India – say the EU is exceeding its legal jurisdiction by charging for an entire flight, as opposed to just the part covering European airspace.

In a meeting last month in Moscow of the so-called “coalition of the unwilling”, countries opposed to the EU law including India, agreed on retaliatory steps, although it did not agree on enforcing them.

China said in February its airlines were barred from participating in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme unless they gained government approval. Beijing has also suspended the purchase of $14 billion worth of jets from European maker Airbus .

The EU’s Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has said the EU only adopted its current policy because efforts to agree a United Nations scheme to curb rising aviation emissions had failed.

She has repeatedly said the EU will stand by its law unless the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization can come up with a global plan.

The European Parliament has also reiterated support for the carbon charge and officials say it could decide to express its anger at India by blocking the Free Trade Agreement with the country. (source)

The EU is embarking on a very dangerous journey. It will end in tears for the EU, and China and India will be laughing.

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Essential Reading – Dr David Evans: Climate Coup

22 March, 2012 by

Climate sense

Dr David Evans, formerly of the Australian Greenhouse Office, distils the science and politics of climate change into two documents highly approachable for the layman. If you read nothing else, read these:

Climate Coup – The Science [PDF download link]

Our emissions of carbon dioxide cause some global warming, and it has indeed warmed over the last century. But this doesn’t prove that our emissions are the main cause of that warming—there might be other, larger, natural forces on the temperature. The key question is: how much warming do our emissions cause?

Climate scientists use their climate models to estimate how much. In this article we check their main predictions against our best and latest data, and find they got them all wrong: they exaggerated the warming of the air and oceans, they predicted a very different pattern of atmospheric warming, and they got the short-term relationship between outgoing radiation and surface warming backwards. The latter two items are especially pertinent, because they show that the crucial amplification due to the water feedbacks (mainly humidity and clouds), that is assumed by the models, does not exist in reality. This amplification causes two-thirds of the temperature rises predicted by the models, while carbon dioxide only directly causes one third. This explains why the models overestimate temperature rises.

We check the performance of the climate models against impeccably sourced, publicly-available data from our best and latest instruments. See the endnotes for how to download the data yourself. 

Climate Coup – The Politics [PDF download link]

The climate models are incompatible with the data. You cannot believe both the theory of dangerous manmade global warming and the data, because they cannot both be right.

In science, data trumps theory. If data and theory disagree, as they do here, people of a more scientific bent go with the data and scrap the theory.

But in politics we usually go with authority figures, who in this case are the government climate scientists and the western governments—and they strongly support the theory. Many people simply cannot get past the fact that nearly all the authority figures believe the theory. To these people the data is simply irrelevant. Society needs most people to follow authority most of the time, just like an army needs soldiers who do not question orders.

The world’s climate scientists are almost all employed by western governments. They usually don’t pay you to do climate research unless you say you believe manmade global warming is dangerous, and it has been that way for more than 20 years. The result is a near-unanimity that is unusual for a theory in such an immature science.

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Bob Carr's ecotard maiden speech

21 March, 2012 by

Warmist twit

Bob Carr’s cock-up laden first week culminated in a maiden speech which confirms him as a total climate moonbat, to add to his talent for foreign policy gaffes. Not a great asset in a Foreign Minister. Here are a few select quotes:

“Human activity is changing our planet,” he said.

“Each decade has been warmer than the previous one since the 1950s … the Earth that we knew has changed.”

Senator Carr said it was up to Australia to protect the islands of the South Pacific and take bold Australian ideas to the world stage.

Proving he is well read, he referenced many historians, climate scientists and quoted from several books in his speech.

“When I first started reading about it in the late 1980s, what was prophecy is the way we live now,” Senator Carr said.

“Bill Clinton described global warming as nature’s weapon of mass destruction and the brilliant author Bill McKibben in his book Earth reminded us that this is the way we live now, this phenomenon is upon us.” (source)

Pass the Kool-Aid, Bob. Now f**k off. Sorry…

UPDATE: I should explain that having suffered under Carr as premier of NSW when I first arrived in 2005, and then his equally hopeless successors, Morris Iemma, Nathan Rees and Kristina Kennealy, who ground my home state into the dust with their spectacular incompetence and arrogance, I feel more than a little annoyance with Carr now lording it up in the Senate, spouting the same old crap he spouted in Macquarie Street. Grrr…

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UK Madness: Climate Change Act stays

21 March, 2012 by

Huhne Mark II

When Chris Huhne resigned over an alleged driving incident, I had high hopes that Mr Windmill’s climate madness would be rapidly wound back, and the UK may be spared. Pity the poor Brits, then, as it is the Climate Change Act that has been spared, surviving a “green tape” cull to wreck the UK’s economy still further.

Ed Davey, replacement for Huhne, has demonstrated himself to be as clueless as Huhne, totally seduced by the alarmism and spin of the warmists, and happy to see the UK disappear into the ether in its desperate and pointless attempts to control the climate:

Britain’s laws on climate change that push up energy bills for millions of households have been spared, despite George Osborne’s plea for a reduction in expensive green regulations.

Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat Energy Secretary, said he would not scrap or water down the Climate Change Act, after a year-long review into reducing bureaucracy surrounding environmental laws.

The Act underpins all of the Government’s policies on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, from support for wind farms to higher road taxes for more polluting cars.

It costs up to £18 billion per year, the equivalent of £650 for every household, according to a government analysis.

Last year, all Whitehall departments were asked to look at scrapping laws in the Cabinet Office’s Red Tape Challenge, taking suggestions by the public into account.

The Chancellor has said he is “worried about the combined impact of the green policies adopted not just in Britain, but also by the European Union”.

He claims “endless social and environmental goals” mean “businesses will fail, jobs will be lost, and our country will be poorer”.

Mr Davey said yesterday that the Climate Change Act is an “example of essential legislation” and all its supporting regulations must remain unchanged.

His only concession is a consultation on reducing red tape for companies forced to pay for every ton of carbon dioxide they emit.

The move disappointed campaigners against the Act, who have so far collected 1,000 signatures calling for it to be repealed.

Yesterday, Roger Helmer MEP called for the act to be scrapped as it is a “catastrophically disproportionate response to an entirely speculative problem”. (source)

Exactly like the carbon tax to be introduced here in a few months. Australia and the UK can go to the dogs together, then…

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Man-made global warming at Alice Springs

21 March, 2012 by

I certainly believe in man-made global warming in this case, where someone has tinkered with raw weather station data to create an artificial warming trend. As Paul Homewood explains:

imageimage

Before                                                      After (click to enlarge)

 

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260000&data_set=12&num_neighbors=1

 

Not content with reducing past temperatures in the Arctic thus creating an artificial warming trend, GHCN have now been up to their tricks in Alice Springs down under in Oz.

A sharp drop in temperatures in 1976, confirmed in B.O.M. records, seems to have convinced the algorithm that adjustments were needed. The odd thing is that a similar rise in temperature in the following year did not do the same.

Other stations near to Alice show a similar drop in temperatures that year proving that it was not an anomalous reading, e.g. Jervois, the nearest station.

 

image

 

The adjustment has been slipped into the latest update, last week, unlike the Arctic ones which appeared in December. Evidently GHCN are still fiddling around with their software.

I have contacted the Ozzie Met for their comments. However, it is apparent that the latest version of GHCN is rapidly becoming a joke.

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Idiotic Comment of the Day: Greens' Adam Bandt

20 March, 2012 by

Eco-wacko

Like all on the extreme environmental Left, Bandt inhabits a fantasy world where a country like Australia can simply stop using coal, like, today, and our entire economy will continue as normal, powered by, er, you know, solar and wind, right? Total f**kwit.

Mr Bandt said he was “stunned” to hear the state would potentially expand brown coal mining for both domestic use and export and vowed the Greens would try and block the move federally.

“The Premier, Ted Baillieu, is an environmental vandal and must be stopped,” the Melbourne MP told reporters in Canberra.

…

“It seems that the Government refuses to accept that coal causes climate change because if they accepted that they wouldn’t be taking this course of action,” he said. (source)

It’s good to see the Greens reminding everyone how disconnected they are from reality now and again. And also reminding voters that it is ecotards like him that are running the country, thanks to Julia’s grubby deal back in 2010.

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Run for the hills: sea levels to rise 70 feet by, er, sometime…

20 March, 2012 by

It will happen, but we don't know when…

This kind of pointless, gratuitous alarmism does nothing but damage The Cause. It’s like saying “planet will be swallowed by Sun – entire population to die… in 4.5 billion years”.

But I’m not complaining. If the alarmists want to shoot themselves in the foot with this kind of hysterical climate astrology, I’m very happy to sit back and watch them do it:

Even if humankind manages to limit global warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends, future generations will have to deal with sea levels 12 to 22 meters (40 to 70 feet) higher than at present, according to research published in the journal Geology.

The researchers, led by Kenneth G. Miller, professor of earth and planetary sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University, reached their conclusion by studying rock and soil cores in Virginia, Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific and New Zealand. They looked at the late Pliocene epoch, 2.7 million to 3.2 million years ago, the last time the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was at its current level, and atmospheric temperatures were 2 degrees C higher than they are now.

“The difference in water volume released is the equivalent of melting the entire Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, as well as some of the marine margin of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet,” said H. Richard Lane, program director of the National Science Foundation’s Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the work. “Such a rise of the modern oceans would swamp the world’s coasts and affect as much as 70 percent of the world’s population.”

“You don’t need to sell your beach real estate yet, because melting of these large ice sheets will take from centuries to a few thousand years,” Miller said. “The current trajectory for the 21st century global rise of sea level is 2 to 3 feet (0.8 to1 meter) due to warming of the oceans, partial melting of mountain glaciers, and partial melting of Greenland and Antarctica.”

Miller said, however, that this research highlights the sensitivity of Earth’s great ice sheets to temperature change, suggesting that even a modest rise in temperature results in a large sea-level rise. “The natural state of the Earth with present carbon dioxide levels is one with sea levels about 20 meters higher than at present,” he said.

Read it here.

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New HadCRUT temperature record makes 2010 hotter than 1998

20 March, 2012 by

GISS: Tortured (click to see animation)

My advice: ignore all the surface temperature records full stop. GISS (administered by warmist activist James Hansen), HadCRUT (Phil “Climategate” Jones), they’re all as bad as each other – “homogenised” to within an inch of their lives. So it comes as little surprise that the latest version of the Hadley/CRU temperature database now shows 2010 as being warmer than 1998. How convenient.

And isn’t it amazing that it now better fits the global warming narrative? Just like GISS – it was inconvenient that the 1930s were warmer in that dataset than the present, but never mind, they found a way round it (click the image) – magic!

And oddly, despite massive urbanisation in the 20th century, many of the adjustments make earlier years COOLER, the opposite of what would be expected in order to compensate for modern UHI.

If you torture the data enough, they will surely confess:

Researchers have updated HadCRUT – one of the main global temperate records, which dates back to 1850.

One of the main changes is the inclusion of more data from the Arctic region, which has experienced one of the greatest levels of warming.

The amendments do not change the long-term trend, but the data now lists 2010, rather than 1998, as the warmest year on record.

The update is reported in the published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

HadCRUT is compiled by the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit (Cru) at the University of East Anglia, and is one of three global records used extensively by climatologists.

The other two are produced by US-based researchers at Nasa and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).

Cru’s director, Phil Jones, explained why it was necessary to revise the UK record.

“HadCRUT is underpinned by observations and we’ve previously been clear it may not be fully capturing changes in the Arctic because we have had so little data from the area,” he said.

“For the latest version, we have included observations from more than 400 (observation) stations across the Arctic, Russia and Canada.”

Prof Jones added: “This has led to better representation of what’s going on in the large geographical region.”

Despite the revisions, the overall warming signal has not changed. The scientists say it has remained at about 0.75C (1.4F) since 1900. (BBC)

Oh well, I guess there’s only so much you can do in one hit, but give it time.

Much more at WUWT.

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Government's chief alarmist: more floods and more droughts

19 March, 2012 by

Chief Alarmist

UPDATE: Check out the comments, which put Steffen and his alarmist spoutings in their proper place. 

—

A bob each way from Will Steffen, the Gillard government’s chief alarmist:

Climate change is influencing more than just droughts, as the recent CSIRO-Bureau of Meteorology State of the Climate 2012 report clearly outlines.

Temperatures over land and in the oceans continue to increase rapidly, sea levels are rising and extremely hot days have become more common. But it is the recent period of very wet, cool weather bringing floods to many parts of Australia that has grabbed the most attention in the past few months.

The Climate Commission’s report on the science behind southeast Australia’s wet, cool summer provides the broader, long-term perspective needed to understand the significance of the big wet.

…

This emerging pattern of long-term drying across southern Australia, exacerbated by hot days and weeks and periodically interrupted by very intense rainfall and flooding, comes as no surprise to climate scientists. It is entirely consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. (source)

Despite the fact that temperatures have slowed in the last decade (if you look at satellite records rather than corrupted and unreliable surface records), sea levels are rising more slowly (and have not accelerated), Steffen continues to claim that any weather event is “consistent with climate change”. My letter to The Australian editor sets out my response:

Sir,

Perhaps Will Steffen (opinion, 19 March 2012) would kindly inform us what weather pattern would not be “consistent with climate change”. The truth is that the theory of anthropogenic climate change, as stated by Steffen, is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, where any event, be it floods, droughts, higher temperatures, lower temperatures, more cyclones, fewer cyclones, is consistent with climate change. Such a hypothesis cannot be disproved by empirical observations, and therefore isn’t science at all.

Yours faithfully,

Editor, ACM

And if you want another belly laugh, read this pile of tripe in The Age.

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