Iain Murray
Germany and Spain have been hit by the downside of alternative energy.
As the Department of Energy considers a loan guarantee for the Cape Wind Project in Massachusetts, it should learn from Europe’s failed wind energy experiments and from its own troubled experiences with renewable energy projects.
Germany and Spain are waking up to the inevitable truth about renewable energy, especially offshore wind. They are now realizing the projects cannot survive without subsidies and that they make energy much more expensive to households and businesses. In an age of austerity, they are a luxury even Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, cannot fully afford any more.
When Germany decided to close down its nuclear power stations after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the original plan was to replace most of the lost generating capacity with wind power. However, wind power is expensive, and the growing size of the industry has meant that subsidies and energy bills have surged. The German subsidy is paid for by a surcharge on household electricity bills. The growth in wind power meant that in January the surcharge increased to over 5 cents (euro) per kilowatt hour, representing 14% of all electricity bills.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, realizing that wind power is economically unsustainable, has proposed capping the subsidy until the end of 2014 and capping further rises to 2.5%, with the probability of further significant reform after the federal elections this year. It’s a similar story in Spain, where subsidies have been cut so much that the chairman of the country’s Association of Renewable-Energy Producers said recently: “Spain’s government is trying to smash the renewable-energy sector through legislative modifications.”
President Obama has repeatedly said we should look to Spain and Germany for the lead on renewable energy policy. He is right, but not in the way he thinks.
Furthermore, he should look to the Cape Wind project in Nantucket Sound. The project will cost $2.6 billion, and it has secured funding for $2 billion of that from a Japanese bank. But this is believed to be subject to the project gaining a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. And there is every reason to believe that this would be as bad a bet as its loan guarantee to Solyndra.
The contracted cost of the wind farm’s energy will be 23 cents a kilowatt hour (excluding tax credits, which are unlikely to last the length of the project), which is more than 50% higher than current average electricity prices in Massachusetts. The Bay State is already the 4th most expensive state for electricity in the nation. Even if the tax credits are preserved, $940 million of the $1.6 billion contract represents costs above projections for the likely market price of conventional power. Moreover, these costs are just the initial costs, and like in Germany, they are scheduled to rise by 3.5 percent annually for 15 years.
This massive increase in energy costs is bad news for Bay State businesses and may well drive some of them out of the state entirely. That’s a disaster for jobs and for tax revenue.
The likelihood that businesses will not be willing to pay the bill means that the burden will fall increasingly on households. Yet, in all probability, this will be politically unsustainable, and the cost will therefore fall back on taxpayers across the nation, via the loan guarantee.
That’s just the economic argument. When you consider the environmental arguments, the case becomes a no-brainer. As the Alliance to Protect Nantucket sound points out, “Cape Wind threatens the marine environment and would harm the productive, traditional fisheries of Nantucket Sound.”
The Alliance also notes that, “Cape Wind would not make a significant contribution to the effort to reduce pollution emissions, and, in fact, could aggravate the problem by causing dirty power plants to run more often in order to be ready to generate power instantly when the wind stops blowing.”
For the Department of Energy to grant the loan guarantee to Cape Wind would be a triumph of blinkered ideology over real economic and environmental concerns. The president, true to his word, should learn from Germany and turn down the loan guarantee to Cape Wind.
Iain Murray is a vice president at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Dr. Gordon Fulks
If you missed the radio show Saturday, ou can catch the Sunday repeat as described below. The show will also be available from the radio station archives as of Monday, I am told.
I’m far from the super star here. That’s Shannon Goessling, the Executive Director of the Southeastern Legal Foundation. She/they are are one of the principles suing the Environmental Protection Agency over Obama’s attempts to regulate carbon dioxide. We scientists are merely friends of the court, saying that the EPA got the science wrong.
Science is typically too complicated to argue in front of justices who probably paid little attention to science in high school (hated it). But they are masters of logic and evidence in much the same way that scientists are. And unlike the general public, they will put robust empirical data (evidence) ahead of expert opinions. Hence the government’s likely arguments of consensus and authority will have to take a backseat to robust data.
We have been fortunate that the EPA based their ‘Endangerment Finding’ for carbon dioxide on “Three Lines of Evidence” by which they mean ‘Three Arguments.’ These are inherently simple arguments that everyone can understand:
1) The Global Temperature has been unusually warm since 1950.
2) They are nearly 100% certain that man-made greenhouse gases are to blame, because of a mechanism involving water vapor that produces a ‘Hot Spot’ in the tropical troposphere.
3) Their highly sophisticated computerized climate models are able to keep track of all factors and accurately predict the future out 100 years.
Of course all of these arguments are fatally flawed. And since these arguments are fundamental to all of the hype that follows from them (like melting icecaps), the entire theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming falls apart and EPA has no basis for regulating carbon dioxide:
1) Failed Warming: There has been little net warming since 1950 and all has occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, not globally. Furthermore, there has been no statistically significant warming for two decades.
2) Failed Hot Spot: The ‘Hot Spot’ is completely missing.
3) Failed Predictions: ALL of the climate models used by the EPA are epic failures for their inability to accurately predict the earth’s climate since the advent of robust satellite temperature measurements in 1979.
Three strikes and you are out in the old ball game!
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I SPY - Slaying the Monster: The EPA
I Spy can now be heard Sunday: 7:00 - 8:00 p.m. (Pacific time) tune to KAJO (1270-AM) or if you’re outside of the Grants Pass, OR, listening area, go to www.kajo.com and hit the listen live button at the top of the page.
Our Guests: Physicist, Dr. Gordon Fulks, & Shannon Goessling, Exec. Dir. of Southeastern Legal Foundation
By Alan Caruba
While the nation tries to come to grips with the cascade of scandals involving the Obama administration, a significant phenomenon has been occurring. It is the demise of the global warming/climate change hoax that has driven national and international policies since the 1980s.
Directed from within the bowels of the most corrupt international organization on planet Earth, the United Nations, the hoax originally generated the Kyoto Protocols in December 1997 to set limits on the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UN’s climate charlatans claimed that CO2 was causing the Earth to dramatically warm. It was a lie. The U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify it and, in 2011, Canada withdrew from it.
As reported by Craig Rucker, Executive Director of CFACT, fast-forward to the recent UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and news that Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked the adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation”, part of the standard fast-tracking toward a 2015 Climate Treaty scheduled to be adopted and signed in Paris. Part of the treaty is a scheme to redistribute the wealth of developed nations to those less developed.
The Russians were fed up with the usual behind-closed-doors proceedings that create such treaties, but no doubt they were well aware that the treaty would empower the UN to govern a large portion of economic activity around the world. All UN treaties require nations to surrender some aspect of their national sovereignty.
There is clearly a backlash against the global warming hoax, particularly from nations that have discovered the costs to their economies that idiotic “renewable” energy schemes and emissions reductions incur. In the real world, they are experiencing longer, harsher winters as the result of the cooling cycle the Earth has been in for the last seventeen years!
Despite President Obama’s incessant claims that the Earth is heating, scientists in both Russia and China have been publishing data from scientific studies disputing the Big Lie of global warming/climate change.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences 50,000 members strong recently published “Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report”, two hefty volumes with more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.
In May, Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee submitted written testimony to the committee.
“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim from A to Z the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing,” wrote Morano, “and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.”
“There is no evidence,” wrote Morano, “we are currently having any unusual weather.” Weather events such as the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the sub-tropical storm Sandy that hit the northeast are normal occurrences despite the damage they inflicted.
In The Wall Street Journal in May, Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote that “Thanks to the single minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”
Literally thousands of scientists around the world have disputed the IPCC “science” and many former “warmists” have reversed their former beliefs. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a top Swedish climate scientist, formerly affiliated with the IPCC, said in February “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified...there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic…
“The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that, if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
The threat facing Americans is posed by the Environmental Protection Agency that clings to the Big Lie about CO2 and uses it as the basis for a flood of regulations that are doing great harm to economic recovery and development.
The same holds true for the Departments of Energy and the Interior that deny access to the nation’s huge reserves of energy resources and, in the case of coal, act to destroy its mining industry and plants using it for the generation of electricity.
The global warming/climate change hoax continues to be widely taught in the nation’s schools and that should end. Now.
It continues to be reported as truth by the mainstream media and as fodder for Hollywood movies and for television programs such as those on the National Geographic Channel.
Despite the lies surrounding global warming/climate change, the hoax is in its final death throes and has been for many years. That’s the good news.
By Dr. Roy Spencer
ICECAP UPDATE: Spring for the USA in the UAH LT data was coldest since 1984 and fifth coldest in the record back to 1979. It came after the warmest spring in 2012. We await the NCDC US rankings.
Enlarged
June 4th, 2013
Courtesy of John Christy, a comparison between 73 CMIP5 models (archived at the KNMI Climate Explorer website) and observations for the tropical bulk tropospheric temperature (aka “MT") since 1979 (click for large version):
Rather than a spaghetti plot of the models’ individual years, we just plotted the linear temperature trend from each model and the observations for the period 1979 to 2012.
Note that the observations (which coincidentally give virtually identical trends) come from two very different observational systems: 4 radiosonde datasets, and 2 satellite datasets (UAH and RSS).
If we restrict the comparison to the 19 models produced by only U.S. research centers, the models are more tightly clustered:
Now, in what universe do the above results not represent an epic failure for the models?
I continue to suspect that the main source of disagreement is that the models’ positive feedbacks are too strong...and possibly of even the wrong sign.
The lack of a tropical upper tropospheric hotspot in the observations is the main reason for the disconnect in the above plots, and as I have been pointing out this is probably rooted in differences in water vapor feedback. The models exhibit strongly positive water vapor feedback, which ends up causing a strong upper tropospheric warming response (the “hot spot"), while the observation’s lack of a hot spot would be consistent with little water vapor feedback.
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UAH Global Temperature Update for May 2013: +0.07 deg. C
June 4th, 2013
Our Version 5.5 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for May, 2013 is +0.07 deg. C, down a little from +0.10 deg. C in April (click for large version):
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The global, hemispheric, and tropical LT anomalies from the 30-year (1981-2010) average for the last 17 months are:
YR MON GLOBAL NH SH TROPICS
2012 1 -0.134 -0.065 -0.203 -0.256
2012 2 -0.135 +0.018 -0.289 -0.320
2012 3 +0.051 +0.119 -0.017 -0.238
2012 4 +0.232 +0.351 +0.114 -0.242
2012 5 +0.179 +0.337 +0.021 -0.098
2012 6 +0.235 +0.370 +0.101 -0.019
2012 7 +0.130 +0.256 +0.003 +0.142
2012 8 +0.208 +0.214 +0.202 +0.062
2012 9 +0.339 +0.350 +0.327 +0.153
2012 10 +0.333 +0.306 +0.361 +0.109
2012 11 +0.282 +0.299 +0.265 +0.172
2012 12 +0.206 +0.148 +0.264 +0.138
2013 1 +0.504 +0.555 +0.453 +0.371
2013 2 +0.175 +0.368 -0.018 +0.168
2013 3 +0.183 +0.329 +0.038 +0.226
2013 4 +0.103 +0.120 +0.086 +0.167
2013 5 +0.074 +0.162 -0.013 +0.113
Global Microwave SST Update for May 2013: -0.01 deg. C
June 5th, 2013 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
The satellite-based microwave global average sea surface temperature (SST) update for May 2013 is -0.01 deg. C, relative to the 2003 to 2006 average (click for large version):
The anomalies are computed relative to only 2003 to 2006 because those years were relatively free of El Nino and La Nina activity, which if included would cause temperature anomaly artifacts in other years. Thus, these anomalies cannot be directly compared to, say, the Reynolds anomalies which extend back to the early 1980s. Nevertheless, they should be useful for monitoring signs of recent ocean surface warming, which appears to have stalled since at least the early 2000’s. (For those who also track our lower tropospheric temperature ["LT"] anomalies, these SST anomalies average about 0.20 deg. C cooler than LT since mid-2002, but there is considerable variability in that number).
The SST retrievals come from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), and are based upon passive microwave observations of the ocean surface from AMSR-E on NASA’s Aqua satellite, the TRMM satellite Microwave Imager (TMI), and WindSat. While TMI has operated continuously through the time period (but only over the tropics and subtropics), AMSR-E stopped nominal operation in October 2011, after which Remote Sensing Systems patched in SST data from WindSat. These various satellite SST datasets have been carefully intercalibrated by RSS.
Despite the relatively short period of record, I consider this dataset to be the most accurate depiction of SST variability over the last 10+ years due to these instruments’ relative insensitivity to contamination by clouds and aerosols at 6.9 GHz and 10.7 GHz.
Jean Chemnick, E&E Published: Friday, May 31, 2013
Congressional Democrats have pressed their Republican colleagues for three years to hold a hearing on climate change, and yesterday one did in the heart of West Virginia’s coal country.
See full coverage here. Dr. John Christy’s testimony in six slides here.
Despite having introduced a bill last week that would bar U.S. EPA from promulgating rules that would require the use of carbon capture and storage technology until a panel of officials from outside the agency deemed it to be economically and technologically feasible, Rep. David McKinley (R-W.Va.) hosted yesterday’s climate change forum in a technology park in Fairmont, W.Va.
McKinley’s office said “is fascinated by this issue” and read several books on climate change in preparation for the event, including Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-Okla.) “The Greatest Hoax,” which denies that man-made warming exists.
“The congressman’s take-away is that the science is still unclear,” said his office. “There needs to be open debate about this in Washington, and both sides need to be represented and simply talk.”
The West Virginia venue was chosen because McKinley wanted his constituents to be able to take part in the debate, his staff said. An effort was made to balance the invited guests between those who believe in climate change and those who do not.
“Many environmental groups declined to come as they felt it was not worth the discussion to come to W.Va.,” his office said. “But this was about bringing the debate to the citizens of West Virginia to hear both sides.”
Participants estimated the crowd at 70 people or fewer and said it appeared to be equally divided between skeptics and climate science believers. The discussion lasted more than three hours.
The diverse group of experts McKinley invited to the West Virginia High Technology Consortium included many of the same people Republicans frequently call to Capitol Hill to discuss the issue: contrarian scientists who say human emissions aren’t driving climate change, like atmospheric sciences professor John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and skeptic activists like former Inhofe aide Marc Morano and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
But the panel also included mainstream researchers who are among the (alleged - greatly exaggerated) 97 percent of scientists who agree that human emissions are driving climate change, according to a recent analysis of scientific papers.
These included Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Scott Denning and Jim Hurrell, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Earth System Laboratory.
Representatives of think tanks who were part of the event said they found McKinley’s approach to the issue encouraging.
“He made a few comments that did lift my spirits, and I thought, maybe he is really serious about trying to think about ways to deal with climate change,” said Joe Casola, senior scientist for the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions.
He said McKinley, who is an engineer by training, asked several times what it might take for the United States to bring its emissions under control, something Casola called “a constructive beginning.”
But Casola said that if McKinley’s purpose in holding the hearing was to get a genuine read on the effect fossil fuel use is having on climate, he should have stocked his panel with mainstream scientists rather than skeptics whom he said frequently steered the discussion toward other topics, like preindustrial climate fluctuations.
Annie Petsonk of the Environmental Defense Fund, who also took part in the discussion, said she, too, was impressed with what she saw as McKinley’s genuine interest in climate change science and in how it might affect the Mountain State’s economy.
“He is clearly concerned about the issue of diversifying West Virginia’s economic base, which he should be,” Petsonk said. A major focus of the congressman’s remarks was how to keep technology research in West Virginia after Morgantown’s National Energy Technology Laboratory saw its budget hit by sequestration.
While McKinley’s office said West Virginia’s iconic coal mining industry would continue to grow, it pointed out that lower-emissions natural gas is also an important economic sector.
The state’s 1st District, which McKinley represents, has both wet and dry gas and the “possibility of several ‘crackers’ coming to the district bringing tens of thousands of jobs,” McKinley’s office said.
Climate skeptics, too, praised the event, saying it allowed them to make their case that human emissions are not having a significant effect on warming and that efforts to rein them in are unnecessary.
Morano called the event “refreshing.”
“When actual debate occurs like we saw at the hearing, we see just how much of man-made climate fears are based on ‘projections,’ ‘predictions’ and ‘maybes,’” Morano said. He pointed out that scientists on the panel did not agree on several key points.
“Team global warming had a scientific civil war going on during the debate about whether there was a current global warming signal in our global average [temperatures] or even weather,” he said. See Morano’s written testimony here.
The tragic deaths in Oklahoma will be used be Global Warming attacks as prima facie evidence that Global Warming is real and the government needs to do something about it. That will mean, of course, a loss of freedoms and more taxes to pay.
History and facts can be irritating to people who have an agenda to feed. These agenda pushers feed on ignorance. The less people know, the easier they are to control.
In 1975, an article was published that blamed Global Cooling for weird and destructive weather.
“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
“The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April [1974], in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
“To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century
of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
The last paragraph of the article is predictable. The government was called on to do something. One proposal was to melt the Arctic ice cap:
“Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
From the April 28, 1975 issue of NEWSWEEK magazine.
By Woody Zimmerman
The great dream of progressive politicians is to find a problem whose prescribed solution appears to require unending increases in taxation or political control preferably both with production of no measurable improvement. Ideally, the situation would be one in which the perception is opposite to reality i.e., where the “solution” actually worsens the true situation.
Sounds crazy? Who would do anything this nutty? Answer: we would. And to “fix” what problem? Answer: Global Warming. Since the 1990s the Greenies have been pounding the government-control/taxation drum for lessening carbon-dioxide emissions, on the premise that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” that increases the earth’s surface-temperature by trapping the heat of the sun.
For a time, in the 1990s, warming appeared to be happening. Former Vice-president Al Gore built an entire new career (and a considerable fortune) on the theory that CO2 causes warming. He preached a message of advancing doom, claiming it was “settled science."” He chose data selectively and omitted important facts like the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, when temperatures went up several degrees. He also neglected to mention the Little Ice Age (AD 1450-1850), when glaciers advanced, canals froze, and global temperatures plunged. Dr. Gore’s famous “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures vs. time ignores these salient periods, which were caused by entirely natural events beyond man’s control.
Although one would scarcely realize it from current news reports, the fact is that the climate has not warmed over the past 15 years. Instead, global cooling appears to be the new climate-dynamic.
To illustrate this, I present as evidence a chronology of world-wide climate-events over the past year, compiled by Geoffrey Pohanka. (http://isthereglobalcooling.com/ ) Mr. Pohanka argues that we are now in a period of global cooling, but I’ll let the reader draw his own conclusions from the data presented.
Feb. 2012: Europe and the Far East in the deep freeze. Coldest temperatures in Germany in 26 years; over 300 die from hypothermia and storm-caused accidents. Biggest Rome snowstorm since 1986. Three weeks of record cold in Europe: temperatures 25 C below normal; coldest February in 26 years; one of ten coldest in last 150 years. China temperatures hit -50 C. Coldest winter in memory freezes 40% of Mongolian livestock. Temperatures down to -50 C.
March 2012: Warm first quarter in eastern USA, but Oregon and Washington have all-time record snowfalls. Second largest ice extent on record in Bering Sea. Record cold in Tasmania, Australia. Huge snowfall in China kills 90,000 livestock and impacts 25,000 people.
April 2012: Sydney, Australia has coldest April 10th in 80 years.
May 2012: UK has coldest May in 200 years.
June 2012: Sweden has one of its coldest Junes since records began in 1789. Rare cold in New Zealand. Argentina frosts lead to agriculture crisis. Seattle has third coldest June in history.
July 2012: Emergency in Argentina due to cold; a dozen people freeze to death in Chile. Tasmania has record low temperatures.
August 2012: South Africa has snow in all 9 provinces for first time in recorded history.
September 2012: Extent of Antarctic sea ice is the largest ever recorded on Sept 12.
October 2012: Record cold grips part of Australia; earliest snow in a century. Surprise snow hits central Germany. Heavy snow catches Muscovites unprepared. For only the second time in recorded history all Austrian provinces have snow in October.
November 2012: Early cold snap kills 14 in Poland. Hurricane Sandy causes record snowfall in Appalachians. Three tourists die from cold on Great Wall of China due to early snow. Winter hits early on three continents. Record snow around USA, including Northeast. Globe seized by record cold: UK faces coldest winter in 100 years; Arctic sees record refreeze; snow in New Zealand.
December 2012: UK had coldest autumn since 1993. European deep-freeze kills hundreds. Record snow in Norway. Severe cooling grips Eastern Europe: over 600 die from cold; dozens die in Poland cold-snap. State of emergency declared in Ukraine due to huge snows; 37 dead in 24 hours. Russia faces strongest winter in decades: -50 C temperatures; people freezing to death; over 125 dead so far; snow up to 16 feet deep. Motorists near Moscow trapped for days on highway during snowstorm, backup extends 125 miles. State of emergency declared in Siberia; -60 F temperatures. Massive cold front grips Asia; northern India cold wave kills 25. USA has the most snow cover in ten years. Record snow in Minneapolis. December 2012 had largest Northern Hemisphere snow cover ever recorded.
January 2013: Asia gripped with record cold: hundreds dead; Bangladesh has coldest temperatures since 1960s. Russia buried under snow. Over 300 die from brutal cold in Eastern Europe. 29 die from cold in Mexico. Bermuda has record daily low temperature.
February 2013: New England snow is record. German winter temperatures are dropping at rate of 6 C per century. Alps cooling since 2000, according to peer-reviewed literature. Heaviest snowfall in a century hits Moscow. All-time low Northern Hemisphere temperature of -96 F recorded in Oymyakon, Siberia. Japan has heaviest winter snow in recorded history. Germany has darkest winter in 43 years.
March 2013: Winter 2012 to 13, November-February, ranked 4th largest snow in history; #2 for Northern hemisphere. December ‘12 had most December snow ever. Arctic sea ice largest in a decade. UK in deep freeze: deaths from cold mounting; coldest spring since 1963; UK gas rationing as shortages mount with coldest weather in 50 years. Second coldest March in USA since 1969. Calcutta has coldest day in 100 years and record low March temperatures. Berlin has coldest March in 100 years. Germany’s coldest spring on record: late March temp of -33 C is coldest March temperature in over 100 years. Climate models fail to predict brutally cold European temperatures. Thousands of animals buried alive in Ireland by snow drifts.
Never heard of most of this? If you live in the Eastern USA, where most of our news originates, that’s not surprising. It’s unlikely that most of what’s summarized above will have reached the USA’s liberal controlled mainstream media. Record-setting cold and snow do not fit the global warming storyline being peddled by liberal politicians and their media lapdogs. Thus, the average man-on-the-street will disbelieve these extreme-weather reports if he sees them. He still thinks we’re all going to roast and drown in rising oceans unless we pay all we have to the government.
The “chattering classes” in the USA express dismay over the lack of climate-interest shown by China, India and Russia. Those reports for the past year give a good indication of why they’re not down with the warming struggle: they’re freezing to death and they’re up to their hips in snow. Why would they want to cool things down any more?
Yet our own political leaders from both major parties continue to push ruinously expensive “cures” for the humanity-threatening problem of “anthropogenic warming.” Our president has already implemented his war on coal that will make the price of electricity “skyrocket” (his own term). He wants to do the same for the gasoline we need for our cars. He refuses to allow exploitation of our newly realized reserves of oil and natural gas that would give us energy security for a century or more.
All this is in the name of protecting the climate by controlling carbon-dioxide emissions. On that premise, we are pouring billions into absurd industries which will have absolutely no effect on climate, but will waste fortunes that our people need to live indeed, to survive. Much of the world already knows that the earth is cooling, not warming, but our Leader is charging ahead with plans to sacrifice our economy on the Altar of Climate. What he cannot obtain by law he will execute by executive order and Cabinet regulations.
The inmates are running the asylum here. We must stop them before we’re all broke, pedaling rickshaws, and freezing to death in the dark. Global warming is the greatest hoax in history.
Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 16 April 2013
The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works. Yesterday’s story means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for environmentalists everywhere; if the EU can’t make the green agenda work, it’s unlikely that anybody else will give it a try.
The European Parliament just voted down a measure that would have attempted to revive its carbon market, likely dooming it to a slow and undignified death. This was a last-ditch effort to drive the EU’s carbon price back to a level that would incentivize green reforms. And it failed.
The EU’s carbon market was the flagship program of its recent green efforts. Ideally, it would have given companies a reason to emit less carbon. Companies that emitted less than allowed could have sold off remaining carbon credits to firms that emitted more. But the authorities gave out too many credits, and as Europe’s economy faltered the price for those credits plummeted. The vote today was meant to save the program by addressing this over-allocation, creating an artificial shortage that would drive permit prices back up, but in a time of financial crisis, the European Parliament chose industry over green ideology. The WSJ reports:
“It was a vote of reason,” said Poland’s environment minister, Marcin Korolec. Poland, one of the EU’s less-affluent members, has been outspoken in its opposition to the measure, which it said could hamper development. [...]
After the vote, the price [of carbon credits] dropped to 2.55 Euros before recovering partially to 3.2 Euros...down from nearly 30 Euros in 2008.
Without the backloading plan to increase scarcity on the emissions permit market, “the ETS will almost certainly collapse,” said Kash Burchett, a London-based analyst at consulting company IHS Energy.
The EU has been the global laboratory testing the green agenda to see how it works. Today’s story means that the guinea pig died; the most important piece of green intervention in world history has become an expensive and embarrassing flop. It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of this for environmentalists everywhere; if the EU can’t make the green agenda work, it’s unlikely that anybody else will give it a try.
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Listen Now: Full One Hour Audio of Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano available here:
Selected Excerpts: ‘If you just start scratching the surface of this issue, not only will you not believe, but you will be angry...Warmist climate claims are ‘insulting to our intelligence. They are insulting to science’
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‘No matter the weather, they can point to what study they need, they have covered themselves on both sides of the aisle by all of the contradictory predictions they have made. This is where it morphs into horoscope or astrology. They can credibly cite some study to support their claim. Why? Because they pretty much predicted everything and anything as some point. This is what they are calling science....If you predict everything and anything, you will have a study to back it up. That’s where the bastardization of science continues unchecked.’ (See: Unfalsifiable: More Than 30 Contradictory Pairs Of Peer-Reviewed Papers)
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But the warmists still claim ‘it’s worse than we thought.’ But how is worse than we thought? Sea level is not accelerating, polar bears are thriving, global avg temps stalled. They will reply ‘Haven’t you heard? By 2060 they (the warmists) are now predicting x,y,z,.’ But wait a minute, that not worse than we thought. That just another scary prediction. As the real world data fails, prediction of the future get scarier and scarier. It’s almost as if they want to distract us from reality.’
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“Regardless of environmental scare - and we are talking global cooing [of 1970s], overpopulation, species extinction, sustainable development, deforestation - they always have the same solution. You can go back and plug and play, plug in different environmental scare, but guess what, it is always the same solution. More centralized planning, more international government control, perhaps a global tax of some kinds, management of countries, violation of sovereignty. We now have German climate advisor calling for CO2 budget for every man, woman, and child on the planet.