Q: What did wind and solar-obsessed Westerners use before candles? A: Reliable and affordable electricity.

And, before they became fixated on their attempt to run on nothing but sunshine and breezes, Westerners had reliable and affordable electricity in abundance.

That was then. This is now.

A burst of calm weather and sunset these days combines to send wind and solar output to the floor and power prices through the roof. That’s because the owners of dispatchable power (ordinarily gas-fuelled open-cycle gas turbines or diesel engines) can charge a king’s ransom for adding a little power to a grid that’s repeatedly on the brink of collapse.

All of a sudden Westerners are talking about blackouts like never before, as John Hinderaker outlines below.

Blackouts Here We Come
Powerline
John Hinderaker
25 February 2024

People around the world are increasingly realizing that “green” energy is actually black–as in blackouts. Thus, in today’s Telegraph: “The UK is much closer to blackouts than anyone dares to admit.”

We are heading for a big electricity crunch as it is. Whoever wins the general election, the next government will be committed to decarbonising the National Grid – by 2035 in the case of the Conservatives and by 2030 in the case of Labour. That means either closing all the gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology – which does not yet exist on scale in Britain and whose costs are likely to be massive. At the same time every single one of our existing nuclear power stations is currently due to reach the end of its life by 2035. If Hinkley C is delayed much beyond its latest estimated completion, we could end up with no nuclear at all.

That could leave us trying to power the country pretty much with intermittent wind and solar energy alone – and this at a time when politicians want millions more of us to be driving electric cars and heating our homes with heat pumps, thus substantially increasing demand. How will we keep the lights on? One struggles to find satisfactory explanation from the National Grid ESO, which is trusted with this task.

Britain is not alone in that regard. It is extraordinary that no one in any country has actually tried, seriously, to figure out how to power a modern economy with intermittent and absurdly expensive wind and solar power. We are simply cruising toward disaster with inept and even senile politicians at the helm.

It has produced a vision for a winter’s day in 2035 which foresees massive amounts of energy being stored in the form of green hydrogen produced via the electrolysis of water – a technology which may not be ready by then.

Or may not be ready, ever. I’ve been hearing about miraculous hydrogen energy for decades.

It also sees Britain importing around a quarter of its electricity. What happens if the countries we import it from are also short of renewable energy, it doesn’t say.

That is what happened a year or so ago when Duke Energy’s customers suffered a blackout. Duke’s plan included importing electricity from other states when the wind didn’t blow and it was dark out. But–surprise!–the wind wasn’t blowing in nearby states, either.

But now we get to the real plan, to the extent there is one:

But another large part of the picture seems to be “demand flexibility” – a polite term for rationing energy through smart meters, jacking up the price whenever supply is short. No wonder the Government seems keener than ever to force smart meters on us.

A “smart meter” is one that will adjust the temperature in your house, or otherwise reduce your use of electricity, when the utility can’t produce enough electricity to meet demand. In other words, the plan is for us to get poorer through electricity rationing.

This is Great Britain, but you could say the exact same thing about the U.S. or most other Western countries.
Powerline

From MINDING THE CAMPUS

By Joe Nalven

Wicked problems need wicked science to, minimally, frame what is puzzling. Wickedness is not a moral judgment. Instead, it is tied to the limits of knowing—when rationality is encumbered by ambiguity and uncertainty and when control over the variables is limited or currently impossible. Predictions that emerge from modeling, especially those that reach decades into the future, cannot be adequately evaluated in the present, thus affecting whether such predictions have low, middling, or high confidence. The policymaker is left to choose between effective or ineffective programs based on blind faith, ideology, and hope. This is the arena where Judith Curry offers enlightenment about the stumbling blocks to robust climate science. As a seasoned climate scientist, she asks us to dwell on the uncertainty and risk in predicting climate change and, equally important, to understand the different policy principles used to enable programs to affect climate and its effects.

When I first studied climate in the 1980s, it was limited to air pollution policy in the San Diego-Tijuana air basin. The focus was on measurable pollutants, air transport, and stationary versus mobile sources. It was also about what a developed nation—United States—could address versus a developing nation—Mexico. The physical context aided policymakers in their transborder efforts at cooperation.

Over the decades, environmental policy concerns have shifted focus in a major way to climate change. Multiple disciplines are required—from ocean dynamics, volcanic activity, atmospheric processes, radiative activity from the sun to human activity along with geological, historical, and contemporary data sources to predict climate and its distributive manifestations next year, ten years, fifty years, and more into the future without, unfortunately, being able to include significant technological fixes. Indeed, a very different order of measurement and global understanding from my early experiences of a local, transborder location.

I am often surprised how California state and local entities craft policies they believe would put us on the path to addressing the complex dynamics of what we label climate change. Whether these efforts—a bullet train to and from small cities, banning the sale of gasoline cars by 2035, limiting the use of gas appliances, and similar aggressive policies—make real-world sense or whether they are a virtue-signaling crystal ball without a feasible way of measuring those efforts remains to be seen.

The question should be how a policy maker, and more importantly, the general public, can rationally judge whether the expenditure of large funds and regulating the daily lives of its citizenry are effective. This question requires metrics of whether CO2 is the primary cause of human-made climate change; whether the efforts in California and elsewhere make any measurable difference in a planet-wide climate; whether the costs in lifestyle and economic activity are equal to the benefits; whether policy efforts prove to be lawful within the legal framework of local, state, and national laws; whether innovative technology may prove to be a more straightforward and more cost-effective approach, and similar questions. Judging the “answers” to these questions requires an understanding of certainty and risk. Certainty, and the humbler approach of uncertainty, require metrics we can be confident about. And depending on those metrics, decisions require a gamble on what objectives are attainable and at what cost. Risk is a matter of perception—of individual residents, academics, policymakers, journalists, and pundits. Here, in the climate change arena, we need transparency about which metrics and risks deserve to be seen as scientific or simply guesses.

Judith Curry’s book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, provides an important entry point into this discussion. She addresses a methodology for assessing risk, one that is generally avoided and misused. Instead, we often find policy and punditry based on slogans, memes and stereotypes. This latter approach makes it easier to argue for a policy X than for a policy Y. It also avoids understanding how “facts” emerge from a complex methodology.

It is worth taking Curry’s point of departure, acknowledging that climate and climate change require a sense of wickedness. Key to Curry’s approach is a dynamic adaptive decision-making approach than one based on static plans that are nearly impossible to implement.

Under conditions of deep uncertainty, static plans are likely to fail, become overly costly to protect against failure, or incapable of seizing opportunities. Alternatively, flexible plans can be designed that will adapt over time. In this way, a policy can be responsive to an evolving knowledge base and technologies.[1]

Curry provides the example of Germany and how its energy policies became counterproductive over time. The seemingly correct decision to phase out its nuclear plants by 2022 in the face of the Japanese Fukushima disaster in 2011 resulted in fairly rapid—given the crystal ball prediction of much greater timelines—negative consequences from having to restart coal fired plants to geopolitical instability with Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

While that example is well-known, Curry folds it into what ought to be fundamental to the contours of climate change—a wicked problem given the multiple physical systems involved in its analysis—and the contours of policymaking—given the wickedness of uncertainty and risk entailed by factors inside and outside of policies that aim to fix questionable predictions about the current and future environment. Curry provides a careful history and understanding of risk analysis with attendant cautionary and precautionary principles and how these are weighted to problems with different degrees of confidence of what is actually and what is poorly known, and perhaps even guesses. The problem of policymaking becomes even more wicked once one moves from memes and slogans to scientific inquiry.

Curry does not leave us with a Hamlet-type problem of tragic delay of whether to act or not to act. She is not using the thoroughness of risk analysis as a partisan tactic in the face of uncertainties. Unfortunately, scientists who speak of wicked climate change problems are painted as denialists rather than what they are—climate pragmatists. Climate pragmatism offers adaptive solutions that can address local effects. Bjorn Lomborg, author of False Alarm, is well-known for this approach.

Curry provides a useful section illustrating climate pragmatism with several examples of adaptation and maladaptation. Bangladesh has a longstanding problem with flooding and rising sea levels—partly understandable as land subsidence from groundwater withdrawal, partly from land reclamation that creates a funneling effect—and the damage from storm surges during tropical cyclones. With technical assistance from CFAN, the company Curry is with after leaving the academy, a flood forecasting system was developed for the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers that was incorporated into a cell phone warning system. The result was evacuation and early harvesting efforts. Curry notes that Bangladesh has also chosen a fruitful development path against the advice of NGOs and global environmental groups by continuing to use its natural gas resources, thereby extending the time framework with which it can eventually implement an energy transition and not undermine the well-being of its citizens in the interim.

One would be naïve if this book was accepted as a rational and thoughtful approach to a useful policy and science interface. As anyone mildly familiar with climate change analysis and policy, there are barriers that Curry and similar climate pragmatists face—delusion, illusion, hysteria, manipulation, implausibility, and bad actors. Curry resists such characterizations. At most, Curry shows that a better-to-be-safe-than-sorry mindset can end up with one that makes us more sorry than safe. How does that common-sense wisdom get expressed in risk analysis? Compare two guiding principles: the proactionary principle and the precautionary principle. These are two mindsets at play in how we see climate change hazards and risks:

The proactionary principle is designed to bridge the gap between no caution and the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle [safety at all costs] enforces a static world view that attempts to eliminate risk, whereas the proactionary principle [openminded, innovative] promotes a dynamic worldview that [in turn] promotes human development and risk-taking that produces the leaps in knowledge that have improved our world. The proactionary principle allows for handling the mixed effects of any innovation through compensation and remediation instead of prohibition. [citation] Rather than attempting to avoid risk, the risk is embraced and managed. The proactionary principle [values a] calculated risk-taking as essential to human progress.[2]

Curry’s robust approach that underwrites her climate pragmatism makes sense to many, and yet, there is a mindset that acts as a psychological barrier—one that has underwritten international treaties and goal setting out of proportion to the risk analysis laid out by Curry. Curry draws on the work of Cass Sunstein, a behavioral economist and legal scholar, to identify “cognitive mechanisms” that channel thinking into a narrow instead of a broad perspective about risk. This narrow view plays out in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where precaution overwhelms a balanced judgment:  “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures . . . ensur[ing] global benefits at the lowest possible cost.”[3] (Emphasis added).

The psychological barrier to climate pragmatism has yet to overwhelm all nations—witness aggressive fossil fuel development in China and India—or popular sentiment that rejects climate extremism. This barrier deserves more extensive treatment since it forms a significant wedge against climate pragmatism.[4]

Reading Curry’s analysis could lower the anxiety of those who cling to untested, and possibly, illusory solutions. A close reading of Climate Uncertainty and Risk could temper the overreach of climate justice warriors, leaving room for needed appreciation for climate pragmatism.

I recently observed a climate justice warrior propounding an end-of-the-world eschatology.  The facts—actually a proposed hypotheses—were sufficient to move several teenagers in attendance to express their anxiety about what would happen in the near future. The climate justice advocate dwelled on the “tipping points” we apparently faced. It was a beguiling end-of-the-world prediction. The actual scientific assessment of this scenario was not disclosed nor open to discussion.

The IPCC AR5 considered a number of potential tipping points, including ice sheet collapse, collapse of the Atlantic overturning circulation, and carbon release from permafrost thawing. Every single catastrophic considered by the IPCC AR5 has a rating of very unlikely or exceptionally unlikely and/or has low confidence.[5] (Emphasis in the original).

Curry’s approach stands in stark contrast to the overreach and catastrophizing by climate justice warriors. Those warriors and their acolytes are unlikely to be persuaded by Curry’s pragmatic, but seemingly slower, approach to a changing climate.

There is no magic wand, no scientific alchemy, that can easily upend cognitive catastrophizing about weather events.

The disconnect between historical data for the past 100 years and climate model-based projections of worsening extreme weather events presents a real conundrum regarding the basis on which to assess risk and make policies when theory and historical data are in such disagreement.[6]

Curry’s book could offer an antidote to the extremes in public thought, to the pundits who misinform them and to those policymakers who fail to address climate change issues in a robust and informed way. Despite this pessimistic outlook, Curry has planted the flag on the ground of what climate science ought to be.

[1] Curry, 221

[2] Curry, 198

[3] Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, Principle 15, U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 151/26 (Aug. 12, 1992)

[4] Note that Curry has written about this separately on her blog, Climate Etc. Victims of the faux climate crisis, Part 1: Children

[5] Curry, 11

[6] Ibid.

Roger Caiazza

Irina Slav on energy Substack is described as “All things energy. Challenging the dominant narrative because facts matter”.   Her latest article “Burn, Hollywood, burn” calls out the blatant indoctrination and propaganda associated with Hollywood today.  As always when you dig deeper it is all about money for the shills.

In her introduction, Slav expressed a concern that is common to many of us here:

A couple of days ago, in a conversation with David Blackmon on X, I unthinkingly commented that we’ve reached peak idiocy in the transition narrative. David wisely reminded me that we keep getting proven wrong in this by the narrative constantly discovering new peaks to strive for and conquer. Alas, I couldn’t disagree.

In my work here I’ve mostly focused on calling out the climate indoctrinators in the media, in politics, and, occasionally, in schools. But there is an indoctrination channel I have so far steered clear of, for reasons of mental self-preservation. I get angry about things, you see, and I don’t really like being angry. When I saw this article on Rolling Stone a while ago, however, I got too angry to bother about disliking being angry.

The article is a symphony of climate propaganda done absolutely openly and eagerly, with an unshakeable conviction that amplifying climate catastrophism is the right thing to do. Through all means necessary.

She explains how this article is evidence of the incessant indoctrination of the masses regarding climate change.  Earlier the emphasis was on social justice but now there is a shift:

That was the social justice stage of the indoctrination drive. Now, we seem to have reached the next stage, which is all about climate change, a distillate of social justice issues, if you will, since every single problem we have today can be traced back to climate change by the eager narrative pushers. Why so eager, you might ask? Well, because there’s money and fame in it.

The most revealing part of her article for me was her description of the organization called Good Energy.  She describes it thusly:

Said organisation exists with the sole purpose of making climate change a central topic in movies and TV shows. Because it’s important, of course. The most important topic ever. And these gracious people are there to guide film folk on the journey to internalising this so they can make more climate change-centric movies and TV shows.

Here’s an excerpt: “We aim to make it as easy as possible to weave climate into any aspect of a story. Applying the Climate Lens™ to your narrative can reveal complexities in character and setting, add conflict, and unlock touching, funny, and surprising storylines — all of them backed by climate science, psychology, and lived experiences.”

Incidentally, while helping writers, directors and producers “weave climate into any aspect of a story” and why not every single aspect of a story, they’d make some money from this because these consulting services are not free. Indoctrination is a mission but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a business at the same time, and how cool is that!

The Good Energy “Library of Experts” is interesting for a couple of reasons: the wide range of expertise disciplines that claim a link to their work and climate change and the number of individuals who loyal readers here might recognize like Dr. Peter Kalmus.  Slav goes on to expose a potential driver for their concern about climate change:

Speaking of money, the Daily Sceptic has done a great job in exposing the financial backing of Good Energy and similar organisations or shall I say formations because it certainly sounds more appropriate. You won’t be surprised to learn that this backing comes from climate obsessed billionaires. Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Sierra Club pop out among the list of backers, along with the Walton Family Foundation and One Earth.

She takes an optimistic view of this:

Sad as all this may be there is a silver lining and that silver lining lies in the fact that propaganda has never, ever produced quality art of any form or quality entertainment. Good art and good entertainment tell stories, invoke various emotions, and, if done really well, result in some form of catharsis.

Climate propaganda does not tell stories. It only aims to invoke one emotion and that’s fear. It hammers in a message disguised as a story that is so solid and unwieldy it defies interpretation. You can only swallow it whole. Or ridicule it, of course, because it is ridiculous.

Since climate propaganda in film – and in literature, too – is so rigid, it’s doomed to failure, just like the identity politics trend in literature. The reason for this is that while there may be many people with a mental age of four when it comes to discriminating between art and propaganda, there are many more who instinctively sense the difference and sooner or later shun the latter.

I hope she is correct.  I tend to be a bit more pessimistic because I think that the inevitable reality slap of the insane transition policies may occur after irreparable harm.  I encourage you to read all of her article and consider subscribing to her Substack.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  More details on the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act are available here and an inventory of over 370 articles about the Climate Act is also available.   This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Patsy Lacey

HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!!

Hundreds of sites across most of the Great Barrier Reef are turning white from heat stress in the fifth mass coral bleaching event in eight years.

Aerial surveys over two-thirds of the reef have confirmed ‘widespread’ bleaching, the It was only a year ago that Australia’s leading reef expert, Dr Peter Ridd, reported that coral cover was at record highs: said on Friday.

Climate change is the biggest threat to tropical reefs worldwide, and coral bleaching is caused by heat stress.

It’s not always fatal but corals are likely to die if temperatures remain higher than normal for too long.

Reef Authority chief scientist Roger Beeden said bleaching had been recorded at 300 sites from Cape Melville north of Cooktown to just north of Bundaberg.

‘The results are consistent with what we have seen with above average sea surface temperatures across the marine park for an extended period of time,’ Dr Beeden said.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13171743/Great-Barrier-Reef-coral-bleaching.html#newcomment

It was only a year ago that Australia’s leading reef expert, Dr Peter Ridd, reported that coral cover was at record highs:

London, 8 February – A new paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation refutes alarmist claims about the state of the world’s coral reefs.
According to the author, eminent reef scientist Peter Ridd, the official data show no signs of any long-term trends in reef health. Indeed, the best records – for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef – suggest that coral cover is at record highs.
Dr Ridd said:
“The public are constantly told that reefs are being irreparably damaged by global warming, but bleaching events, about which there is so much doom-mongering, are simply corals’ natural response to changes in the environment. They are an extraordinarily adaptable lifeform, and bleaching events are almost always followed by rapid recovery.”
Dr Ridd suggests that rather than being seen as under threat from climate change, corals should actually be recognised as one of the organisms least likely to suffer harm in a warming world.
“Corals get energy from a symbiotic relationship with various species of algae. When environmental conditions change, they can rapidly switch to a different species that is better suited to the new conditions. This shapeshifting means that most setbacks they suffer will be short-lived.”
Dr Ridd says that the real risks to reefs come from overfishing and pollution.
The GWPF invited responses to this paper from authors likely to dissent from its conclusions. None of the authors who were contacted accepted this invitation.
Peter Ridd: Coral in a Warming World: Causes for Optimism (pdf)

As Peter Ridd’s report noted, it only in the last two or three decades that the GBR has really been systematically surveyed. Yet there is plenty of evidence that similar bleaching events have frequently occurred in the past, particularly during El Nino events. They were just never observed.

Whereas it was natural to assume that coral reefs would die off after bleaching, Ridd shows that they actually recover very quickly. Bleaching, far from being fatal, is actually a remarkable
adaptive response to changing temperature, because having expelled the microscopic algae, which gives it its colour as well as energy, it reabsorbs another strain of algae which thrives in warmer water. The opposite happens when the seas cool.

Ridd concluded:

The Mail report includes this comment, which exposes the thing as a scam:

Australia’s emissions of CO2 are just 1% of the world’s, so calling on the Federal Government to reduce emissions will make no difference whatsoever to the reef. Instead they are using the reef as an excuse to force through their left wing political agenda.