Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 20 Jun 2017

A New Hiatus Consensus?

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

A scientific consensus has emerged among top mainstream climate scientists that “skeptics” or “lukewarmers” were not long ago derided for suggesting — there was a nearly two-decade long “hiatus” in global warming that climate models failed to accurately predict or replicate.

A scientific consensus has emerged among top mainstream climate scientists that “skeptics” or “lukewarmers” were not long ago derided for suggesting — there was a nearly two-decade long “hiatus” in global warming that climate models failed to accurately predict or replicate.

A new paper, led by climate scientist Benjamin Santer, adds to the ever-expanding volume of “hiatus” literature embracing popular arguments advanced by skeptics, and even uses satellite temperature datasets to show reduced atmospheric warming.

More importantly, the paper discusses the failure of climate models to predict or replicate the “slowdown” in early 21st century global temperatures, which was another oft-derided skeptic observation.

“In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble,” reads the abstract of Santer’s paper, which was published Monday.

“Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed,” reads the abstract, adding that “model overestimation of tropospheric warming in the early twenty-first century is partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings used in the model simulations.”

The paper caught some prominent critics of global climate models by surprise. Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. tweeted “WOW!” after he read the abstract, which concedes “model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed” for most of the early 21st Century.

It’s more than a little shocking.

Santer recently co-authored a separate paper that purported to debunk statements EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt made that global warming had “leveled off.” But Santer’s paper only evaluated a selectively-edited and out-of-context portion of Pruitt’s statement by removing the term “hiatus.”

Moreover, climate scientists mocked Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for talking about the global warming “hiatus” during a 2015 congressional hearing. Instead, activist scientists worked hard to airbrush the global warming slowdown from data records and advance media claim that it was a “myth.”

Santer and Carl Mears, who operate the Remote Sensing System satellite temperature dataset, authored a lengthy blog post in 2016 critical of Cruz’s contention there was an 18-year “hiatus” in warming that climate models didn’t predict.

They argued “examining one individual 18-year period is poor statistical practice, and of limited usefulness” when evaluating global warming.

“Don’t cherry-pick; look at all the evidence, not just the carefully selected evidence that supports a particular point of view,” Santers and Mears concluded.

Cruz’s hearing, of course, was the same year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its “pause-busting” study. The study by lead author Tom Karl purported to eliminate the “hiatus” from the global surface temperature record by adjusting ocean data upwards to correct for “biases” in the data.

Democrats and environmentalists praised Karl’s work, which came out before the Obama administration unveiled its carbon dioxide regulations for power plants. Karl’s study also came out months before U.N. delegates hashed out the Paris agreement on climate change.

Karl’s study was “verified” in 2016 in a paper led by University of California-Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, but even then there were lingering doubts among climate scientists.

Then, in early 2016, mainstream scientists admitted the climate model trends did not match observations — a coup for scientists like Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger who have been pointing out flaws in model predictions for years.

John Christy, who collects satellite temperature data out of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, has testified before Congress on the failure of models to predict recent global warming.

Christy’s research has shown climate models show 2.5 times more warming in the bulk atmosphere than satellites and weather balloons have observed.

Now, he and Santer seem to be on the same page — the global warming “hiatus” is real and the models didn’t see it coming.

Full post

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

June 20, 2017 at 08:07AM

Uncategorized 20 Jun 2017

Experts Published A Scathing Rebuttal To The Left’s Favorite Green Energy Study

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

A group of researchers have published a scathing rebuttal to a 2015 report claiming the U.S. could run on 100 percent green energy, which they say suffered from “significant shortcomings.”

The 2015 study led by Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson claimed wind turbines, solar power and hydroelectric dams could power the entire U.S. But 21 researchers published a retort to Jacobson’s study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Jacobson’s “work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions,” reads the PNAS study’s abstract.

“Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power,” wrote the 21 experts, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Christopher Clack.

The researchers were worried politicians would use Jacobson’s study to promise a “greener” world that’s more expensive and less technology achievable than they let on.

David Victor, an energy policy expert at University of California-San Diego and PNAS co-author, said Jacobson’s study sets “wildly unrealistic expectations” that could cause a “massive misallocation of resources.”

“That is both harmful to the economy, and creates the seeds of a backlash,” Victor told MIT Technology Review.

So far, only Hawaii has a policy calling for 100 percent green energy, but California Democrats are pushing legislation to get all its electricity generated from green energy by 2045.

Environmentalists and some Democrats hailed Jacobson’s paper when it was first published. The study was even featured in the anti-fracking film “Gasland II” and attracted the attention of celebrities, like Mark Ruffalo.

Full post

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

June 20, 2017 at 08:07AM

Uncategorized 20 Jun 2017

Scientists Sharply Rebut Influential Renewable Energy Plan

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

On Monday, a team of prominent researchers sharply critiqued an influential paper arguing that wind, solar, and hydroelectric power could affordably meet most of the nation’s energy needs by 2055, saying it contained modeling errors and implausible assumptions that could distort public policy and spending decisions (see “Fifty-States Plan Charts a Path Away from Fossil Fuels”).

The rebuttal appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same journal that ran the original 2015 paper. Several of the nearly two dozen researchers say they were driven to act because the original authors declined to publish what they viewed as necessary corrections, and the findings were influencing state and federal policy proposals.

The fear is that legislation will mandate goals that can’t be achieved with available technologies at reasonable prices, leading to “wildly unrealistic expectations” and “massive misallocation of resources,” says David Victor, an energy policy researcher at the University of California, San Diego, and coauthor of the critique. “That is both harmful to the economy, and creates the seeds of a backlash.”

The authors of the earlier paper published an accompanying response that disputed the piece point by point. In an interview with MIT Technology Review, lead author Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, said the rebuttal doesn’t accurately portray their research. He says the authors were motivated by allegiance to energy technologies that the 2015 paper excluded.

“They’re either nuclear advocates or carbon sequestration advocates or fossil fuels advocates,” Jacobson says. “They don’t like the fact that we’re getting a lot of attention, so they’re trying to diminish our work.”

In the original paper, Jacobson and his coauthors heralded a “low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem.” It concluded that U.S. energy systems could convert almost entirely to wind, solar, and hydroelectric sources by, among other things, tightly integrating regional electricity grids and relying heavily on storage sources like hydrogen and underground thermal systems. Moreover, the paper argued, the system could be achieved without the use of natural gas, nuclear power, biofuels, and stationary batteries.

But among other criticisms, the rebuttal released Monday argues that Jacobson and his coauthors dramatically miscalculated the amount of hydroelectric power available and seriously underestimated the cost of installing and integrating large-scale underground thermal energy storage systems.

“They do bizarre things,” says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the rebuttal. “They treat U.S. hydropower as an entirely fungible resource. Like the amount [of power] coming from a river in Washington state is available in Georgia, instantaneously.”

In an e-mail, Jacobson stood firm on every conclusion in the original article: “There is not a single error in our paper.”

Other models, including Kammen’s, do show that the U.S. can transition to nearly 100 percent zero-emissions energy technologies. But the established view among energy researchers is that it would require making use of nearly every major technology available and that the transition, particularly getting the last 20 percent or so of the way there, would be prohibitively expensive using existing technologies. One of the key missing pieces is affordable grid-scale storage that can efficiently power vast areas for extended periods when wind and solar sources aren’t available (see “Why Bad Things Happen to Clean-Energy Startups”).

Various political and advocacy figures have embraced Jacobson’s ideas. Prior to the 2015 paper, he published a 50-state plan for moving to 100 percent renewables by midcentury, which he says contributed to decisions by both New York and California to enact laws requiring 50 percent renewable energy sources by 2030.

He also cofounded a clean-energy advocacy group, the Solutions Project, whose board members include actor and activist Mark Ruffalo and commentator Van Jones. In late April, Senator Bernie Sanders co-wrote an op-ed with Jacobson in the Guardian, highlighting the 50-state research and trumpeting a bill proposed that week that would move the United States to 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

The authors of Monday’s rebuttal were quick to stress that cutting emissions as quickly as possible is a crucial goal. The concern is that paths for getting there will be wrong if they’re based on incorrect assumptions or miscalculations. Among other things, it can skew the public debate by suggesting it’s merely a question of marshaling political will, rather than achieving difficult technological breakthroughs and substantial cost reductions.

That could lead to spending public resources on the wrong technologies, underestimating the research and development still required, or abandoning sources that might ultimately be necessary to reach the stated goals.

Notably, there is growing fear that accelerating retirement schedules for the U.S. fleet of nuclear plants will make it increasingly difficult to make the transition to clean energy. While some interest groups remain opposed to the technology, many researchers believe it should be a crucial part of the energy mix, since it’s the only major zero-emissions source that doesn’t suffer from the intermittency issues plaguing solar and wind.

“Energy issues are complex and hard to understand, and Mark’s simple solution attracts many who really have no way to understand the complexity,” Jane Long, another coauthor and former associate director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in an e-mail. “It’s consequently important to call him out.”

Read more at MIT Technology Review

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

June 20, 2017 at 08:03AM

Uncategorized 20 Jun 2017

Is renewable energy in Devon ‘an unmitigated disaster’?

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

By Paul Homewood

Congrats to Philip Bratby, who has had a report published by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) into renewable energy in his local county, Devon.

It has unsurprisingly generated a kickback from the renewable lobby:

Countryside campaigners and renewable energy experts have clashed on how renewable energy has benefited the county, with campaigners calling it "an unmitigated disaster".

In a damning report published recently by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) Devon trustee Phillip Bratby it states that the renewable energy industry in the South West "has been entirely dependent on subsidies for its growth and its survival".

Regen South West, an independent not-for-profit organisation set up to promote renewable energy in the region, has hit back at the CPRE report.

Regen chief executive Merlin Hyman has pointed out Mr Bratby’s "views on climate change and renewables are somewhat at odds with those of the scientific community and indeed of CPRE nationally who commissioned Regen to look at how we can meet the Paris Climate Change Agreement whilst minimising landscape impacts".

In the report, published on CPRE Devon’s website, it states: "The renewable energy industry has been entirely dependent on subsidies for its growth and its survival.

"The generation of energy from ineffective and inefficient renewable sources has created subsidised employment and has thus led to a huge reduction in productivity. Wealth has been destroyed on a massive scale.

"There is no evidence that the deployment of renewable energy has led to any reduction in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions; on the contrary, it is possible that overall, emissions have increased.

"The deployment of renewable energy technologies has resulted in a detrimental impact on the landscape, on tranquillity, on heritage aspects, on residential amenity, on property values, on tourism, on local businesses, on agricultural land and on grid reliability and security of supply."

Sources of renewable energy have popped up all over Devon, earlier this month a solar farm near Holsworthy had it’s temporary contract extend a further 15 years.

Mr Hyman disagrees with Mr Bratby and says far from taking away from local communities renewable energy brings people together.

"The extraordinary growth we are now seeing in renewable energy across the world is a source of hope, hope we are beginning to turn the tide on climate change, hope that humanity can turn our ingenuity to looking after the one planet we have and hope that change can be led by local communities working together," said Mr Hyman.

"The first working steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen in Dartmouth in 1710. I am proud that three hundred years later Devon is once again playing a leading role in an energy revolution, this time by harnessing our natural resources to produce clean, renewable power locally.

"Already the UK produces 25% of its electricity from renewables and I have no doubt that in the years ahead we will be charging our smart phones and powering our washing machines with clean power harnessed from the sun and the wind."

Mr Bratby suggests in his report that the county would be better served by one gas fired power station, he wrote: "The amount of renewable electricity currently generated in the whole of the South West could be produced by a single generator at a gas-fired power station for less than a seventh of the capital cost.

"No subsidies would be required. The excess cost of renewable electricity to all consumers (domestic, industrial and commercial) in Devon is over £80 million per year and in the South West is over £400 million per year. The brunt of the extra costs has been felt most by those in fuel poverty."

"I conclude that the deployment of renewable energy in Devon and the South West has been an unmitigated disaster. The only beneficiaries have been landowners,developers, foreign manufacturers and renewable energy promoters."

CPRE UK’s infrastructure campaigner Daniel Carey-Dawes commented: "Phillip Bratby’s report is, as the director of CPRE Devon notes, a personal one, so he is of course welcome to his opinions of renewable energy.

"CPRE is concerned about the impact of any type of energy infrastructure on our celebrated landscapes and is actively looking at ways the UK can meet its carbon reduction targets without destroying our beautiful countryside, whether in Devon or elsewhere.

"However, climate change is the most urgent and complex environmental issue this country is facing and it is already taking its toll on the English countryside. If we don’t do our best to reduce its impact, within a few decades it will have altered many of our most cherished landscapes forever."

http://ift.tt/2to6pZR

I have left a comment, and would suggest others do. It is a pain in the bum registering, and I found I had to resubmit the comment after registering. But it is important we don’t let the idiots win this debate.

I have already left a comment about this ridiculous statement by the CPRE infrastructure campaigner:

However, climate change is the most urgent and complex environmental issue this country is facing and it is already taking its toll on the English countryside. If we don’t do our best to reduce its impact, within a few decades it will have altered many of our most cherished landscapes forever.

There are a couple of other claims in the story that warrant closer attention:

1) The extraordinary growth we are now seeing in renewable energy across the world is a source of hope, hope we are beginning to turn the tide on climate change

I assume he is referring to this!

http://ift.tt/1RSrHnr

2) Already the UK produces 25% of its electricity from renewables and I have no doubt that in the years ahead we will be charging our smart phones and powering our washing machines with clean power harnessed from the sun and the wind."

Well let’s first remember just what the cost of this is: