North Dakota governor orders emergency evacuation of pipeline protest camp

via Climate Change Dispatchhttp://climatechangedispatch.com

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum issued late Wednesday an emergency evacuation order for Dakota Access protesters still located in the floodplain, citing the threat of “injury or death” and “ecological disaster” from the rapidly melting snowpack. The mandatory evacuation sets a deadline of 2 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 22, the same cut-off established by the U.S. […]

via Climate Change Dispatch http://ift.tt/2jXMFWN

February 15, 2017 at 11:06PM

SA Blackout: a grid crippled by complexity

via JoNovahttp://joannenova.com.au

South Australia suffered it’s fifth blackout in five months last week. The AEMO report on that incident came out today. There are lots of faults, errors and small problems, and one overriding theme — it’s too complex:

AEMO (Grid market managers) thought they’d have more wind power. It fell to only 2% of “total output.” There was a computer glitch which “load shed” more people than necessary. Oops. SA Power Network apologized today. Demand was higher than expected.  The gas plant generators at Port Lincoln were ““not available due to a communications system problem”. (Whatever that means.) That was 73MW out of action. One turbine at Torrens Gas plant was out for maintenance (120MW gone). Another was running 50MW low because of the heat. (Seriously, these machines operate at hundreds of degrees and work at 35C but not so well at 42C? (Or whatever it was). Color me skeptical. Perhaps some grid engineers can comment and tell us if this is normal?

So in a modern renewable grid we have variations in supply and demand that are of the order of the average grid load and at the whim of The Wind. What could possibly go wrong?

Finally the SA […]

via JoNova http://ift.tt/1hXVl6V

February 15, 2017 at 09:53PM

Obama’s FTC Charged an Academic Journal Publisher

via Defeat Climate Alarmismhttps://defyccc.com

“The FTC’s complaint alleges that OMICS Group, Inc., along with two affiliated companies and their president and director, Srinubabu Gedela, claim that their journals follow rigorous peer-review practices and have editorial boards made up of prominent academics. In reality, many articles are published with little to no peer review and numerous individuals represented to be editors have not agreed to be affiliated with the journals.” – from its press release on August 26, 2016.

These alleged crimes of OMICS Group sound very much like actions of IPCC and the Cambridge University Press, publishing IPCC reports.  What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, isn’t it?

via Defeat Climate Alarmism https://defyccc.com

February 15, 2017 at 09:31PM

Problems in Modeling and Forecasting Climate Change: CMIP5 General Circulation Models versus a Semi-Empirical Model Based on Natural Oscillations

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

Abstract: Since 1850 the global surface temperature has warmed by about 0.9 oC. The CMIP5 computer climate models adopted by the IPCC have projected that the global surface temperature could rise by 2-5 oC from 2000 to 2100 for anthropogenic reasons. These projections are currently used to justify expensive mitigation policies to reduce the emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases such as CO2. However, recent scientific research has pointed out that the IPCC climate models fail to properly reconstruct the natural variability of the climate. Indeed, advanced techniques of analysis have revealed that the natural variability of the climate is made of several oscillations spanning from the decadal to the millennial scales (e.g. with periods of about 9.1, 10.4, 20, 60, 115, 1000 years and others). These oscillations likely have an astronomical origin. The same considerations yield to the conclusion that the IPCC climate models severely overestimate the anthropogenic climatic warming by about two times. Herein I demonstrate a number of failures of the IPCC models and I propose a semi-empirical climate model able to reconstruct the natural climatic variability since Medieval times. I show that this model projects a very moderate warming until 2040 and a warming less than 2 oC from 2000 to 2100 using the same anthropogenic emission scenarios used by the CMIP5 models. This result suggests that climatic adaptation policies, which are less expensive than the mitigation ones, could be sufficient to address most of the consequences of a climatic change during the 21st century. Finally, I show that a temperature forecast made in 2011 by Scafetta (Ref. 25) based on harmonic oscillations has well agreed with the global surface temperature data up to August 2016.

Full paper

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

February 15, 2017 at 08:55PM