Ryan Maue :No longer any spread or uncertainty about landfall of Hurricane #Irma … this is happening for sure, unfortunately.
Best wishes to the people of Florida.
Hurrican Irma Forecast
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via JoNova
September 9, 2017 at 05:53AM
Late last month a video of a discussion round featuring green energies was put up on Youtube.
The segment that follows below shows Dr. Detlef Ahlborn, President of the Wind Energy protest group Bundesinitiative Vernunftkraft (German Initiative for Sensible Power) telling us, without mincing words, why wind energy has been a flop in Germany.
Though the discussion round took place late 2015, it resonates just as loudly today.
On German MDR public television, the moderator asks Ahlborn just who profits from wind energy. According to Ahlborn:
The only one who profits from all the ones you mentioned is the landowner because he has a contractual right. All the others are losers.”
Ahlborn says that 80% of German wind parks are making losses. In the German state of Hesse, for example, “not a single newly installed wind park has yielded what was promised. These yields are up to 20% below what was forecast. And the biggest losers are all of us. All of us!”
The problem, Ahlborn elaborates, is that 25% of the wind energy that gets produced is “waste energy”, energy that cannot be used because there is no demand for it. This waste energy ends up getting dumped onto other foreign markets, so much so that neighboring countries have implemented measures to block it out. Ahlborn then says:
The real scandal is that this power gets sold at negative prices, or below market prices and needs to be disposed of at a fee.”
The discussion round then puts up a graphic showing power demand by the German state of Thuringia (middle curve), the state’s wind power output (lower light curve), and the max. peaks of wind power (highest curve):
Chart cropped from MDR FAKT IST!
Ahlborn blasts this inefficient production of wind energy and the waste power that results, saying that wind park projects produce waste that “is a burden on the consumers, a burden on the economy, and a burden on all society – and with this they are destroying our landscape.”
Costs out of control…huge loss of prosperity
Little wonder that the director of Germany’s top economists, Christoph M. Schmidt, recently named Germany’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) as being among the top three programs in need of major reform in the country, saying that “the costs are way out of control” and that it will not succeed without a “huge loss in prosperity“.
Schmidt recently handed the latest annual recommendations over to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Over the past years, led by strong personalities like Ahlborn, and leading environmentalists, resistance to wind energy in most parts of Germany has grown to formidable levels. Lately protest groups have been increasingly successful at blocking projects. Even the government has even rolled back subsidies.
via NoTricksZone
September 9, 2017 at 04:51AM
And it keeps getting worse. Earlier we said the “worst case scenario” was likely to happen, now that includes a delayed turn keeping Irma over the warm waters of the Gulf longer. Delayed landfall S of Tampa Bay would subject entire FL peninsula to potential hurricane force winds. Gusts considerably more (ECMWF) #Irma http://pic.twitter.com/EvEyjPM95V —…
via Watts Up With That?
September 9, 2017 at 03:57AM
“ Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like : It’s time to open our eyes and prepare for the world that’s coming.”
That August 28 Politico article by Slate weatherman Eric Holthaus was one of many trying too hard to blame the hurricane and/or flood on climate change.
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Such stories are typically infused with smug arrogance. Their authors claim to be wise and well informed, and anyone who dares to question their “settled science” must need to have their eyes pried open and their mouths shut.
There will doubtless be similar “retroactive forecasting” tales about Irma, so recent story-telling about Harvey may provide a precautionary warning for the unwary.
I am an economist, not a climatologist.* But blaming Harvey on climate change apparently demands much lower standards of logic and evidence than economists would dare describe as serious arguments.
Atlantic’s climate journalist said, “Harvey is unprecedented—just the kind of weird weather that scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms.”
But Harvey’s maximum rainfall of 51.88 inches barely exceeded that from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 (48”) and Hurricane Easy in 1950 (45”). And what about Tropical Storm Claudette in 1979, which put down 42 inches in 24 hours near Houston (Harvey took three days to do that)?
In such cases, attributing today’s extreme weather to “climate change” regardless of what happens ( maybe droughts, maybe floods ) is what the philosopher Karl Popper called “pseudoscience.” If some theory explains everything, it can’t be tested and it is therefore not science. (Popper’s favorite examples of pseudoscience were communism and psychoanalysis.)
Seemingly plausible efforts to connect Harvey to climate change are precariously based on another unusual event in 2015–16, not long-term climate trends. In theAtlantic , Robinson Meyer wrote that “Harvey benefited from unusually toasty waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As the storm roared toward Houston last week, sea-surface waters near Texas rose to between 2.7 and 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average.” Thank you, 2015–16 El Nino.
Meyer’s source is a single unsourced sentence from “Climate Signals beta ” from the Rockefeller Foundation’s “Climate Nexus” project run by Hunter Cutting (“a veteran political director who develops communications strategy”). Perhaps it would be wiser to consult the National Hurricane Center about Gulf temperatures, which shows they are averaging about one degree (F) above the baseline.
Looking back at any unpredicted weather anomaly, “fact-checking” journalists canalways count on Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth to spin some tale explaining why any bad weather (but never good weather!) must surely be at least aggravated by long-term global climate trends.
“It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly,” writes Michael Mann. Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased from about 86 degrees to 87 “over the past few decades,” he says, causing “ 3–5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere.”
He neglected to point out other compensatory things he surely knows, like that the same climate science predicts a more stable tropical atmosphere, reducing the upward motion necessary for hurricanes.
Even The Washington Post ’s esteemed Jason Samenow got onto shaky ground, writing that “rainfall may have been enhanced by 6 percent or so, or a few inches.”
It would have been nice if he noted that Harvey’s maximum observed rainfall of 51.88 inches is statistically indistinguishable from the aforementioned Amelia’s 48, forty years ago.
In either case, to blame the Gulf’s temperature and moisture in August 2017 on a sustained global increase in water temperatures requires more than theory or “confidence” (faith). It requires evidence.
As it happens, sea surface temperatures (SSTs) were not rising significantly, if at all, during the years between the two super-strong El Ninos of 1997–98 and 2015–16. On the contrary, a January 2017 survey of four major data sources finds that “ since 1998, all datasets show a slowdown of SST increase compared with the 1983–1998 period.”
That may sound as if SST had been increasing rapidly before 1998, but that too is unclear: “Prior to 1998, the temperature changes in Global, Pacific, and Southern Oceans show large discrepancies among [four leading estimates], hindering a robust detection of both regional and global OHC [ocean heat content] changes.”
via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
September 9, 2017 at 02:55AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 