Governor Newsom is doing everything he can to shut down oil production and is blindly pushing California energy policies outside basic energy reality.
The post Mirror mirror on the wall, who raised California energy costs for all? appeared first on CFACT.
via CFACT
January 28, 2023 at 04:07AM
Many people think that wind farms are the key to stopping the use of fossil fuels, but how do we feel about the collateral damage to wild life. Should we risk destroying endangered wildlife in a vain attempt to change the climate? Here is the link:
Evidence says offshore wind development is killing lots of whales – CFACT
via climate science
January 28, 2023 at 03:29AM
On Friday (3rd February 2023), I will be appearing as an expert witness in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in Brisbane. The hearing is about a Freedom of Information (FOI) request that has been denied my husband, Dr John Abbot, for over three years. The information, I will argue, needs to be made public, to enable some assessment of the reliability, or otherwise, of temperatures as recorded at official Australian Bureau of Meteorology weather stations.
Claims that we are facing a climate catastrophe because temperatures will soon be exceeding 1.5 °C is driving the closure of coal mines, caps on the price of gas and a mental health epidemic amongst children who increasingly fear global warming.
Temperature measurements as published by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and other such weather bureaus around the world, are at the heart of the concern, because they purportedly show an unprecedented increase, particularly over recent years.
While on the one hand in correspondence to me the Director of the Bureau Andrew Johnson has claimed temperature measurements from the platinum resistance probes, which now replace mercury thermometers at most official recording stations, are equivalent, the Bureau at the same time has made changes to official temperatures as recorded at Cape Otway Lighthouse theoretically* of 0.5 °C for the 84 years from 1910 to 1994 based on the instrument change – temperatures have according to the ACORN-SAT Station Adjustment Summary been dropped down from 15th April 1994 back to 1st January 1910 by 0.5 °C because the Bureau estimates that this is the effect of the change from mercury thermometer to probe on these historic temperatures.
It is important to note that by cooling the past by 0.5 °C, rather than, for example, increasing the value recorded from the probe each day, the Bureau has been theoretically under reporting the temperatures from Cape Otway lighthouse by 0.5 °C since 15th April 1994.
This difference of 0.5 °C – that is one third of the dread 1.5 °C that is driving the closure of coal mines, caps on the price of gas and a mental health epidemic amongst children who increasingly fear global warming – is only an estimate by the Bureau.
The Bureau cannot know the exact amount because the mercury thermometer was removed at the same time the probe was installed at the weather station at Cape Otway lighthouse. The mercury thermometer that was removed on 15th April 1994 had been faithfully used to measure maximum temperatures at Cape Otway lighthouse since 1865 – for 129 years. This information can be found in the Metadata for Cape Otway.
While the mercury thermometer had been good for 129 years, the probe needed replacing after just 14 years, on 11th November 2010 according to the Metadata for Cape Otway.
According to the ACORN-SAT Station Adjustment Summary no additional changes were made to the official historical temperatures following the installation of the second probe.
It is therefore reasonable to assume that temperatures at Cape Otway light house, temperatures that are incorporated into global databases used to calculate global warming, are still reliably 0.5 °C cooler than the ‘real temperature’, in other words the temperature as it would be recorded by a mercury thermometer.
If we add this 0.5 °C to 1.47 °C, which is how much the Bureau estimates Australia has warmed since 1910, then the tipping point of 1.5 °C has already been exceeded!
This should be of immense concern to climate activists. They should be screaming for an audit of temperature measurements.
Because the only way we can know for sure whether the tipping point of 1.5 has been exceeded, or not, is if the parallel data from the 34 weather stations where the Bureau claims to be recording temperatures from mercury thermometers and temperature probes at the same weather station is made public. Then we can know if the probes really do record 0.5 °C cooler than mercury thermometers that were historically used to measure temperatures.
The Bureau has variously claimed that it cannot make this parallel data public because it would be too onerous to scan all the A8 Forms that have the maximum temperatures as recorded manually (written by hand onto paper) from the mercury thermometer each day next, to the digitally recorded temperature from the probe.
More recently the Bureau has claimed that it cannot make this information public because it does not exist, or variously that an A8 Form is not a document and therefore not subject to John Abbot’s FOI request.
Following the intervention of then Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg back in October 2017, I was provided with over 10 681 scanned A8 pages for the period from 1 January 1989 to 31st January 2015). With the assistance of colleagues, I manually transcribed over 4 000 of these A8 Forms beginning 1 November 1996.
Analysis of this data indicates that the first probe at Mildura did indeed record temperatures too cool relative to the mercury thermometer, but the third probe that is now in place records temperatures too hot sometimes by as much as 0.4 °C. If this is indeed the case more generally at weather stations across Australia, then it is possible that the tipping point of 1.5 °C may have been exceeded by nearly one whole degree Celsius, more specifically by 2.37 °C.
We can only know if the parallel data is made public, facilitating an accurate assessment of the change in temperatures across the landmass of Australia since at least 1910.
________
* While the 2014 ACORN-SAT Station Adjustment Summary claims that the only change to Cape Otway maximum temperatures for the period before 15 April 1994 is a dropping-down of 0.5 °C in reality, scrutiny of the ACORN-SAT data currently at the Bureau’s website shows that the change is closer to one degree. To be sure the ADAM (Australian Data Archive for Meteorology) database shows a value of 15.7 °C for Cape Otway for 14th April 1994, and ACORN-SAT (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network) a value of 15.2 °C. Considering the values for 16th April 1994, the ADAM database shows 21.7 °C as the maximum temperature at Cape Otway Lighthouse, while ACORN-SAT shows 22.2 °C. These four values suggest that the Bureau not only cooled the temperatures before installation of the probe by 0.5 °C, but also warmed temperatures after installation by 0.5 °C. So overall the change is 1.0 °C following the installation of the probe. This suggests the probe has actually had a full one degree affect on temperatures. ACORN-SAT is the official homogenised database used to calculate climate change statistics. Values in the ACORN-SAT database are considered an ‘improvement’ on the ADAM values.
I show the effect of the different versions of ACORN-SAT on the original ADAM values in my interactive table unique to this website, and specifically for Cape Otway here: https://ift.tt/645RNmq
The ADAM values can be found here: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/
The ACORN-SAT values can be found here: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/acorn-sat/#tabs=Data-and-networks
Metadata for Cape Otway Lighthouse including instrument changes can be found here: http://www.bom.gov.au/clim_data/cdio/metadata/pdf/siteinfo/IDCJMD0040.090015.SiteInfo.pdf
In the following tables I annotate the relevant information in Metadata document and ACORN-SAT Adjustment Summary.
Table 1.
Table 2.
The ACORN-SAT Station Adjustment Summary, as provided to me in 2014 can be downloaded here.
The feature image at the top of this blog post is of Cape Otway lighthouse. Cape Otway Lighthouse is the oldest surviving lighthouse on mainland Australia. Built in 1848, the lighthouse sits 90 metres above the ocean of Bass Strait.
via Jennifer Marohasy
January 28, 2023 at 12:41AM
One-sentence answer: … because pricing one externality but not others leads to economic and environmental distortions… causing human suffering.
Dr Lars Schernikau
The article is here on Linked-In
Growing up in Eastern Germany, I was taught in school that – in so many words – money is the basis of all evil, particularly if it is made in the Western free-market system. Having spent now 20 years in commodities and energy markets, I concluded otherwise and find that distortions of artificial incentives, rather than those that arise freely, are the source of much perversion.
Among these distortions of markets is the pricing of carbon dioxide, which harms not only people – especially the poor – but also the environment. This is obviously contrary to what we commonly read and certainly inconsistent with what my children are taught in school.
Let me start with the usual disclaimer that I (and most knowledgeable scientists) agree that (1) Earth’ climate is changing, (2) the world has been warming since the 1800s, the Industrial Revolution and the end of the Little Ice Age, (3) Humans have contributed to this warming, and – also – (4) human CO2 emissions have contributed.
However, this article is not about the causes or the negative or positive effects of a warming planet and higher CO2 concentrations (see WEF and NASA on global greening). This article is also not about the scientifically undisputed fact that we don’t know how much warming CO2 causes (McKitrick 2022 and Scafetta 2022). Nor do we discuss the fact that each additional ton of CO2 in the atmosphere has less warming effect than the previous ton (IPCC). See my note at the end of the article on damages from climatic changes and Figure D.
Instead, this article is about the environmental and economic sense or “none-sense” of pricing CO2 emissions as currently practiced in most OECD countries and increasingly in developing nations. It is about the sense or “none-sense” of measuring practically all human activity with a “CO2 footprint”, often mistakenly called “carbon footprint”, and having nearly every organization set claims for current or future “Net-Zero”.
Before you put the article aside and call me bananas, or worse, give me 5 minutes of your time and read on. I promise that I care about the future of both our children and the planet we inhabit. I am aware that fossil fuels cannot power forever ~80% of our world, as they currently do.
I recently discussed the issue of “environmental footprint” with a distinguished Swiss journalist in Zurich. We agreed that our entire existence is based on taking things from nature (“renewable” or not), so the “Net-Zero”-anything discussion ignores a fundamental requirement for our sustenance. We also agreed that it should be our aim to reduce this footprint as much as possible as long as our lives, health, and wealth don’t deteriorate. Now, I am sure, here some readers and many “climate activists” may disagree, which I respect but find unrealistic at a global level. However, I would assume that most agree life ought not to be harmed or shortened for the sake of reducing an environmental impact. Otherwise, there is little room for a conversation.
Figure A: German installed power capacity, electricity production, and primary energy
Source: Schernikau based on Fraunhofer 2022, AGE 2021, Agora 2022; Figure 7 in Book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy”, www.unpopular-truth.com and on Amazon
In any case, it is by now undisputed amongst energy economists that large-scale “Net-Zero” intermittent, unpredictable wind and solar energy increases the total or “full” cost of electricity (OECD 2018 p39, OECD 2019 p19, and our own academic study) primarily because of their inherent net energy and raw material inefficiency, mounting integration costs for power grids, and the need for a 100% backup system because of their intermittency.
My native country of Germany, where electricity costs are the highest of any larger nation, is the best example. Installed wind and solar power capacity is now about 1.5 times higher than “conventional” fully predictable power capacity, or total peak power demand (Figure A). This variable “renewable” wind and solar power capacity now produces about a third of the country’s electricity and contributes about 5% to total energy supply (Figure A). Europe, by the way, is “far” ahead of the world and “only” depends to ~70%, instead of globally ~80%, on oil, coal, and gas for its total energy supply in 2022 (IEA).
Obviously and undisputedly, higher energy costs hurt less affluent people and stifles the development of poorer nations (Figure B). Thus, a move to variable “renewable” energy has “human externalities”. At the margin, poorer people will be “starved off” energy they can’t afford. This means a literal reduction in life expectancy and therefore ending life early (another way of saying “killing”).
The year 2022 was the first in modern history that the number of people without access to electricity did NOT decline. Rather, it increased by a whopping 20 million (IEA) because COVID lockdowns starved people financially. High energy costs do the same, it impoverishes people and causes energy starvation even for entire industries (Financial Times, Economist, on eROI)
.. I was digressing, back to CO2 pricing… The Swiss journalist and I agreed that the environmental footprint of our energy systems is multifold. It includes emissions (various chemicals, particles, and greenhouse gases), raw material input, energy input (that is the energy needed to actually produce the energy we consume), land or space requirement and impact on local climate, animal and plant life, as well as lifetime operational maintenance, waste disposal, and so much more. In addition, there are human health, safety, and financial considerations.
Figure B: Household income spent on energy by total household income
Source: Eschenbach 2017; Figure 38 in Book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy”, www.unpopular-truth.com and on Amazon
We also agreed that these “footprints” need to be considered along the entire value chain all the way from resource extraction, processing, transportation, manufacturing and operation to recycling and disposal. Figure C illustrates how virtually all CO2 pricing or taxation happens only at the stage of “operation” or combustion. How else could a “Net-Zero” label be assigned to a solar panel produced from coal and minerals extracted in Africa with diesel-run equipment, transported to China on a vessel powered by fuel-oil, and processed with energy from coal- or gas-fired power using partially with forced labor? All this energy-intensive activity and not a sing single kilogram of CO2 is taxed (Troszak 2019)? The same applies to a wind turbine and an electric vehicle.
For example, in 2022, Germany reached an average “CO2-Certificate” price of 80 EUR/t, more than 3x higher than in 2020 and 13x than in 2017 (Fraunhofer). This price was solely charged for measured CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion increasing power prices accordingly. Needless to say, wind and solar are not charged. Electric vehicles charged with coal- and gas- fired power are not charged. Diesel and gasoline powered cars are charged. CO2 emitting companies can off-set their CO2 emissions in elaborate off-set schemes that often have questionable, if any, environmental benefits (Guardian)
Remember also, that CO2 tax is basically just a mean to redistribute wealth, with the collecting agency (government) deciding where the funds go. Yes, a CO2 tax does incentivize industry to save CO2… but at a cost to economies, the environment, and often children.
I believe you start seeing my point. Any economist will confirm that pricing one externality but not others leads to economic distortions and, many would say worse, environmental impacts.
Distortion is another word for unintended consequence to the environment, our economies, and the people. Pricing CO2 only during combustion but not pricing methane, or raw material inefficiency, or embodied energy, or energy shortages, or recycling inefficiency, or land requirement, or recycling inefficiency, or greening from CO2… will cause undesirable outcomes. The world will be worse off economically and environmentally.
Protest if you must, but let me offer a simple example. The leaders of the Western world seem to have united around abandoning coal immediately, because it is the highest CO2 emitter during combustion (UN). Instead – demanding reliable and affordable energy – Bangladesh, Pakistan, Germany, and so many more nations have embraced liquified natural gas (LNG) as a “bridge” fuel to replace coal. This “switch” is done despite questions about LNG’s impact on the environment, including the “climate”. This policy, supported by almost all large consultancies, indirectly caused blackouts affecting over 150 Million people in Bangladesh in October 2022 (Reuters and Bloomberg).
For full disclosure, I support all reliable and efficient means of energy supply, including gas. I own shares in gas companies, and I have worked a significant portion of my time in the commodity and coal industries. However, trust me, I gain nothing from this article or my position.
Prof. Claudia Kemfert (green “energy transition” protagonist, energy economist, “climate scientist”, energy advisor to the German government) wrote an academic paper in 2022 pointing out that fugitive methane from gas production has a higher “climate” impact than CO2. Our own earlier academic paper from 2022 available in German and English at Elsevier’s SSRN goes one step further (see also on YouTube). Using only IPCC and IEA data, it turns out that LNG on average is “worse for the climate” than coal. It turns out that anthropogenic airborne CO2 “only” accounts for 35% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gases at the IPCC’s 20-year Global Warming Potential GWP20. Now, I do have concerns about the validity of those GWP and climate sensitivity assumptions of the IPCC, but we used them anyway, maybe we shouldn’t have.
So, the world is embarking on an expensive, Putin-supporting venture to replace as much coal as possible with more expensive LNG. As a result, energy costs go up, dependencies increase, lights go off, and, as per the UN’s IPCC, the “climate gets worse.”
Figure C: Environmental Impact of Energy Systems
Source: Schernikau, adapted from Figure 39 in Book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy“, www.unpopular-truth.com and on Amazon
This is exactly the result of CO2 taxation – just one example of an environmental and economic distortion. By focusing only on CO2, Bangladesh is driven to overreliance on LNG and goes dark. If methane (CH4) from LNG’s production and other sources were taxed, the world changes. Now imagine what would happen if we would truly take into account all environmental and human impacts – both negative and positive – along the entire value chain of energy production, transportation, processing, generation, consumption, and recycling… in so many words… you would be surprised! You would look with different eyes at fossil fuels and certainly nuclear.
That is why I do not support any CO2 pricing, even not along the entire value chain. That is why I fight for honest environmental and economic justice to make a truly positive difference for our future generations, to avoid energy starvation and resulting poverty. We need INvestment in, not DIvestment from 80% of our energy supply to rationalize our energy systems and to allow people and the planet to flourish.
I strongly support increasing adaptation efforts, which has already been successful in drastically reducing anyone’s chance of dying from natural disasters during the past 100 year and reduced GDP adjusted financial damage from those same disasters (OurWorldInData, Pielke 2022, Economist).
Please tell me where I got the logic wrong.
Dr. Lars Schernikau is an energy economist, commodity trader, and author based in Singapore and Switzerland. He studied finance at New York University, received his MBA at INSEAD in France, and obtained his PhD in Energy Economics from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Prior to joining the commodity business, Lars worked for several years at the Boston Consulting Group in the US and Germany. His recent book “The Unpopular Truth… about Electricity and the Future of Energy” is available at Amazon and www.unpopular-truth.com
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Supplementary commentary and notes
For more research and analyses see www.energeia-publishing.com/authors/ or https://www.linkedin.com/lars-schernikau
Author’ note on damages from climatic changes (Figure D):
Figure D: Peer-reviewed literature confirms «un-catastrophic» GDP Impact of projected temperature increases… we should still adapt and further reduce any impact.
Source: Schernikau adapted from Kahn et al 2021 (their best estimates shaded in grey)
via Watts Up With That?
January 28, 2023 at 12:34AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 