This week’s roundup leads with South Australia’s return to dirty diesel generators. SA is touted as Australia’s wind and solar capital, and its quiet effort to increase diesel generation capacity stands as one almighty embarrassing admission of failure. In other news, Peter Dutton (Australia’s Federal opposition leader) is channelling Donald J Trump with an announcement… Continue reading Stop These Things’ Weekly Round Up: 8 December 2024
via STOP THESE THINGS
December 8, 2024 at 12:31AM
When people think about the incoming Trump-Vance administration’s plans to unleash domestic energy production, they likely start with oil and gas drilling, and policies governing fracking and clean coal. Yet nuclear energy has a critical role to play in expanding our domestic energy resources, while also protecting the environment. We shouldn’t let antiquated misperceptions about nuclear production stand in the way.
Support for nuclear energy is at an all-time high in the United States—with 56% of Americans supporting it. Yet this support is lopsided with 70% of men having a favorable opinion of nuclear energy compared to just 44% of women. Women are likely skeptical of nuclear energy due to memories of Soviet-era nuclear mishaps and the notorious Three Mile Island incident, as well as modern fearmongering from the media and radical environmentalists. But nuclear energy has come a long way since then and is now among the most promising technologies in terms of efficacy, safety, and environmental impact.
The incoming Trump administration can appeal to women’s eco sensibilities by highlighting facts about nuclear power as a reliable and environmentally friendly option. Women care deeply about clean air and water conditions, and want natural resources to be stewarded responsibly.
Nuclear energy is the most efficient power source available today. 94 nuclear reactors already supply 18.6% of current U.S. electricity generation. Nuclear, like natural gas, will be essential to meet rising global electricity demand. Unlike intermittent energy sources, like wind and solar, nuclear operates nearly 24/7. It produces near zero emissions while boasting a small environmental footprint compared to utility-scale solar and wind facilities, requiring just a mere square mile of land to accommodate a 1,000 megawatt (MW) power station operating 93% of the year. By contrast, solar and wind function at a fraction of the capacity that nuclear does and require 75 and 360 times more land, respectively, to generate the equivalent amount of electricity. In other words, nuclear power is more dependable, more efficient, requires far less land, and releases negligible carbons—far outpacing renewables on all these measures.
Understandably, women are concerned about the safety protocols and safe storage of nuclear waste (or used nuclear fuel). In the last 60 years, there have only been three significant accidents at nuclear plants worldwide. American nuclear power plants are among the safest in the world and are built to minimize accidental radiation release and meltdowns. Additionally, reactor operators undergo rigorous training and must be federally licensed to supervise these plants. Our Energy Department reports that U.S. facilities pose the least harm to people and the environment due to “safety procedures, robust training programs and stringent federal regulation.”
And while fear about nuclear waste storage is understandable, today there are new and better solutions than ever before. Today, most used nuclear fuel is stored safely at on-site dry casks, and the Trump Energy Department can continue to improve here by prioritizing permanent disposal of nuclear fuel.
When Americans envision nuclear facilities, most start with giant steaming towers like those operated by Homer Simpson. Reality is quite different. In fact, among the most promising developments is the development of small modular reactors (SMRs). These reactors aren’t simply functional; they are aesthetically pleasing and modern.
During his appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, President-elect Trump said he liked nuclear power, but claimed conventional facilities are “…too big and too complex and too expensive.” That’s where SMRs can fill the void.
There are 80 SMR prototypes currently in development. SMRs are capable of producing upwards of 300 megawatts (MW) per module. Used nuclear fuel from bigger reactors is even repurposed to power them.
Two companies are expertly combining functionality with aesthetics—a surefire way to appeal to nuclear-skeptical women. Here in the U.S., the Oklo Aurora powerhouse prototype at the Idaho National Laboratory—slated to go online in 2027—has been lauded for its sky chalet design. Incoming Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a board member for Oklo, a publicly traded nuclear SMR start-up, and can lean on his expertise to get his future boss on board. And across the pond in the United Kingdom, luxury car company Rolls-Royce—unlike competitor Jaguar—is smartly diversifying its portfolio with SMRs. Their prototypes occupy about two soccer fields and are capable of powering about one million homes.
President-elect Donald J. Trump pledged to “unleash energy production from all sources”—including nuclear energy—in a second term. The first Trump administration had 11 major accomplishments pertaining to this reliable power source, including the elevation of the first (and highly qualified) woman, Dr. Rita Baranwal, to oversee the Office of Nuclear Energy.
Women will be essential to making American nuclear energy great again. Let’s hope the incoming Trump-Vance administration taps into this constituency.
Gabriella Hoffman is director of the Center for Energy and Conservation at the Independent Women’s Forum and host of the District of Conservation podcast. Follow her on X at @Gabby_Hoffman
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
via Watts Up With That?
December 8, 2024 at 12:07AM
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This month marks the 15th anniversary of “Climategate”—the release of thousands of emails among climate scientists showing them behaving very badly. The scientists colluded, and still are colluding, to create the perception of a manmade climate crisis, based on their preconceptions about the way the world works, backed by computer model projections—computer models they helped build, inputting their assumptions about what affects global temperatures, an instance of confirmation bias, circular reasoning, or both. By contrast, real-world experience, demonstrated in measured data and trends, shows no crisis has occurred, despite repeated predictions of tipping points and specific terrible events made by climate scolds, none of which have come to pass.
The Climategate scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, politicians, scientists, activists, and crony capitalists studiously ignored it and suppressed it while raking in trillions of dollars from the hoax and exempting themselves from the damage they have inflicted on everybody else. The scientists implicated in the scandal acted like the “wizard” exposed in The Wizard of Oz when Toto pulled back the curtain and showed him to be a fraud. The wizard said, “Ignore the man behind the curtain”; the warming fearmongers did the same, saying in essence, “Ignore the clear malfeasance.” Most governments and mainstream media outlets did just that, instead of ending the charade as in the movie.
Climate Change Weekly and Environment & Climate News have covered Climategate and its aftermath repeatedly in the intervening years, as “consensus” climate researchers were discovered to be participating in similar, related, or entirely new scandals that undermined the pursuit of knowledge through the scientific method, which includes open questioning, debate, testing, and transparency of hypotheses, theories, claims, and any data underlying them. The Heartland Institute produced a study proposing policies to shore up science, not just in climate research but as a whole. Sadly, our proposals have yet to be adopted.
Much ink has been spilled in the years since the emails were first exposed, with some stories defending the embattled researchers and their actions while others detailed the scientific malfeasance in the climate field and the broader concern it exposed for science in general. I thought before and believe still that the scientists’ own words speak for themselves: no amount of context can wash away the bad dealing revealed. Longtime friend and colleague Rob Bradley Jr., Ph.D., the CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research, largely agrees and has helpfully reposted many of the emails on the 15th anniversary of the event, at his informative and insightful Master Resource blog, separating the quotes into various categories of academic wrongdoing. He has kindly allowed me to repost his blog item here.
Climategate Turns 15!
The futile, wasteful anti-CO2 crusade is in its 37th year, dating from the hot, dry summer of 1988 when NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm before U.S. lawmakers, led by Al Gore.
Last week, the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) ended with acrimony over an unenforceable agreement pledging to transfer wealth to developing (Statist) countries for “clean” energy development.
CO2 emissions cuts? With almost all major emitters well beyond the targets set in the 2015 Paris Accord, the (also) unenforceable agreement is losing more and more every day as self-interest swamps aspirations. The recipient welfare states described COP29 as “chaotic,” “complete failure,” “optical illusion,” “stage managed,” and “paltry.” Big Green recognized the international effort as more greenwashing than progress, not unlike prior COP results. Mainstream media has tried to paint a happy face on the walking dead.
COP29’s failure should not be surprising? Stated James Hansen.
[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.
But it all begins with physical science, and the science of climate alarmism has really never recovered from its PR disaster 15 years ago: Climategate. No amount of whitewashing can erase the words, sentences, and paragraphs of one of the greatest scientific scandals of our time. Four categories are mentioned below:
Man-Made Warming Controversy
[HSB Note: the items below are quotes from the emails, followed by who they came from.]
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”
—Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.
“Keith’s [Briffa] series … differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s [Jones] does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on (everyone in the room at IPCC was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably consensus viewpoint we’d like to show w/ the Jones et al and Mann et al series).”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Sep. 22, 1999.
“…it would be nice to try to ‘contain’ the putative ‘MWP’ [Medieval Warm Period]…”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, June 4, 2003
“By the way, when is Tom C [Crowley] going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Aug. 3, 2004.
“I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but it’s not helping the cause, or her professional credibility.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 30, 2008.
“Well, I have my own article on where the heck is global warming… The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
—Dr. Kevin Trenberth, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Oct. 12, 2009.
Manipulating Temperature Data
“I’ve just completed Mike’s [Mann] Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s [Briffa] to hide the decline.
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Nov. 16, 1999.
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were….
—Dr. Tim Osborn, Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Dec. 20, 2006.
“If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip….”
—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008.
“We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e. quality controlled and homogenized) data.”
—Climatic Research Unit web site, the world’s leading provider of global temperature data, admitting that it can’t produce the original thermometer data, 2011.
Data Suppression; Freedom of Information (FOI) Avoidance
“We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try to find something wrong with it.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, email to Warwick Hughes, 2004.
“I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, Feb. 21, 2005.
“Mike [Mann], can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Trenberth] re AR4? Keith will do likewise…. Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his e-mail address…. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 29, 2008.
“You might want to check with the IPCC Bureau. I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 [the upcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report] would be to delete all e-mails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember it.”
—Dr. Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, on avoiding Freedom of Information requirements, disclosed Climategate e-mail, May 12, 2009.
Subverting the Peer-Review Process
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow, even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
—Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, disclosed Climategate e-mail, July 8, 2004.
[HSB additions:]
“Just a heads up. Apparently, the contrarians now have an ‘in’ with GRL [Geophysical Research Letters]. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences that causes me some unease.
“I think we now know how the various Douglass et al papers w/Michaels and Singer, the Soon et al paper, and now this one have gotten published in GRL.”
—Dr. Michael Mann, IPCC Lead Author, disclosed Climategate e-mail, January 20, 2005.
“This is truly awful. GRL has gone downhill rapidly in recent years. I think the decline began before Saiers. …
Proving bad behavior here is very difficult. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. ….”
—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, disclosed Climategate e-mail, January 20, 2005.
Implications
The establishment whitewashed and then pretended that the episode was over. Mr. Climategate himself, Michael Mann, called the episode “pathetic” and “shameless”. [1] “After three inquiries, thousands of column inches and several death threats,” Dave Reay wrote in Nature, “the ‘Climategate’ affair is now subsiding into the long grass of conspiracy blogs.” [2]
Nope. Climategate is nary forgotten as a blatant case of professional misconduct and a classic case of ‘Busted!.” It lives in infamy.
————————-
[1] Mann added:
As for emails that in some way involve me, I hardly see anything damning at all, despite these snippets all being taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad…. Agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat.”
[2] Better reactions were made by Derek Lowe in Science who stated, “what I feel needs to be looked at is the scientific conduct. I’m no climatologist, but I am an experienced working scientist—so, is there a problem here?”
I’ll give you the short answer: yes. I have to say that there appear to be several, as shown by many troubling features in the documents that have come out. The first one is the apparent attempts to evade the UK’s Freedom of Information Act. I don’t see how these messages can be interpreted in any other way [but] as an attempt to break the law, and I don’t see how they can be defended…. A second issue is a concerted effort to shape what sorts of papers get into the scientific literature. Again, this does not seem to be a matter of interpretation; such messages as this, this, and this spell out exactly what’s going on. You have talk of getting journal editors fired…. A third issue I want to comment on are the problems with the data and its analysis…. No matter what you think about climate change, if you respect the scientific endeavor, this is very bad news. Respect has to be earned. And it can be lost.
— Rob Bradley, Jr. (Guest author)
Source: Master Resource
New research published in the Quarterly Journal of Meteorology, Hydrology, and Geophysics suggests any ice melting going on in Greenland is not due to rising temperatures, because temperatures there have been falling since at least the year 2000. That contradicts the impression given by the mainstream media and the academic talking heads they regularly quote.
The international team of researchers used imaging data from satellites and land surface temperature measurements to explore regional, seasonal, temperature, and ice mass/coverage trends between 2000 and 2029. They then conducted a multivariate regression model “to adjust for spatial correlation.”
“We illustrate that most of the land surface of Greenland has stable temperature trends,” the paper states.
“Stable” but not static, and certainly not rising. The researchers found that between 2000 and 2019 the average temperature for the continent declined by approximately -0.055°C per decade. A small decline, but certainly not an increase.
As pointed out at No Tricks Zone, other research indicates Southern Greenland cooled from 1958 through 2001. Together, the two sets of data indicate Southern Greenland experienced a cooling trend for about 60 years.
As a result, the ice-melting Greenland experienced in recent decades has to have been driven by factors other than rising temperatures, the team of scientists and mathematicians conclude: “These observed patterns in LST [land surface temperatures] in Greenland during the study period suggest that the observed ice-sheet melting in Greenland within the last two decades could be due to other factors, not necessarily LST patterns.”
Source: Quarterly Journal of Meteorology, Hydrology, and Geophysics; No Tricks Zone
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
via Watts Up With That?
December 7, 2024 at 08:02PM
