This is not what President-elect Barack Obama’s energy and climate strategists would want to hear. It would be anathema to Al Gore and other assorted luminaries touting renewable energy sources which in one giant swoop will save the world from the “tyranny” of fossil fuels and mitigate global warming. And as if these were not big enough issues, oilman T. Boone Pickens’ grandiose plan for wind farms from Texas to Canada is supposed to bring about a replacement for the natural gas now used for power generation. That move will then lead to energy independence from foreign oil.

Too good to be true? Yes, and in fact it is a lot worse. Wind has been the cornerstone of almost all environmentalist and social engineering proclamations for more than three decades and has accelerated to a crescendo the last few years in both the United States and the European Union. But Europe, getting a head start, has had to cope with the reality borne by experience and it is a pretty ugly picture.

Independent reports have consistently revealed an industry plagued by high construction and maintenance costs, highly volatile reliability and a voracious appetite for taxpayer subsidies. Such is the economic strain on taxpayer funds being poured into wind power by Europe’s early pioneers—Denmark, Germany and Spain – that all have recently been forced to scale back their investments. 

As a result this summer, the U.K., under pressure to meet an ambitious E.U. climate target of 20 percent carbon dioxide cuts by 2020, assumed the mantle of world leader in wind power production. It did so as a direct consequence of the U.K. Government’s Renewables Obligations Certificate, a financial incentive scheme for power companies to build wind farms. Thus the U.K.’s wind operation provides the ideal case study—and one that provides the most complete conclusions. The U.K. has all the natural advantages. It is the windiest country in Europe. It has one of the continent’s longest coastlines for the more productive (and less obtrusive) offshore farms. It has a long-established national power grid. In short, if wind power is less than successful in the U.K., its success is not guaranteed anywhere. For all the public investment, wind produces a mere 1.3 percent of the U.K.’s energy needs. Read more here.

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called on the Queensland Government to follow the lead of New Zealand and initiate a complete review of the science and the cost-benefits of the proposals to levy a new tax on coal and petrol usage.

“All over the world, three factors are triggering a revolt against the lemming-like rush led by the Anglo-Saxons to commit carbon suicide via Emissions Trading Schemes.” “Firstly, the science behind the scare forecasts from IPCC computer models has been shown to be deficient by a growing band of independent scientists. Secondly, the globe itself is sending a warning as daily reports of unseasonal frosts, snow and ice make a mockery of the global warming hysteria. We certainly have climate change, but it is natural global cooling, not man-made global warming.”

“Thirdly, the world financial collapse has forced alert politicians to focus on the immediate concerns of voters - real jobs, and the security of supply for food and power. “The revolt against new carbon rationing and taxes affecting New Zealand now encompasses much of the world including India, China, Indonesia, Brazil, Poland, Italy, Germany and the whole Ex-Soviet bloc. There is naturally no support for carbon rationing from the OPEC world, and falling support from Canada. There is also scant chance that the US Congress and Senate will embrace any expensive new Kyoto pact.”

Soon the only true believers will be the blinkered political and Green zealots in UK and Australia, with cynical support from nuclear-powered France. “Queensland has more to lose from carbon taxes and rationing than any other place in the world. And there has been no unbiased assessment of the costs and benefits of such moves. Any government honestly representing the real long term interests of the carbon capital will lead the push to review where we are headed, why and at what cost?”

“The incoming National government [in New Zealand] will completely review the emissions trading scheme (ETS) - possibly including the science that says humans are to blame for climate change - as part of its support deal with ACT. A draft terms of reference for the review attached to the agreement, includes hearing “competing views on the scientific aspects of climate change” and looking at the merits of a “mitigation or adaptation approach”. The deal requires the National government to pass immediate legislation delaying the implementation of the ETS until the review is complete.”
--Grant Fleming, The New Zealand Herald, 16 November 2008. Reported in CCNet 166/2008 - 17 November 2008.

Read more here.

Turn up the heat, somebody. The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket. Winter has barely come to the northern latitudes and already we’ve got bigger goosebumps than usual. So far the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports 63 record snowfalls in the United States, 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month. Only 44 Octobers over the past 114 years have been cooler than this last one.

The polar ice is accumulating faster than usual, and some of the experts now concede that the globe hasn’t warmed since 1995. You may have noticed, in fact, that Al and his pals, having given up on the sun, no longer even warn of global warming. Now it’s “climate change.” The marketing men enlisted by Al and the doom criers to come up with a flexible “brand” took a cue from the country philosopher who observed, correctly, that “if you’ve got one foot in the fire and the other in a bucket of ice, on average you’re warm.” On average, “climate change” covers every possibility.

This is similar to the science practiced by Dr. James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the source of much of the voodoo that Al Gore has been peddling since the doctor showed up at a Senate hearing in 1988 and told ghost stories that Al swallowed whole. Only last month Dr. Hansen’s institute announced that October was the hottest on record, and then said “uh, never mind.” The London Daily Telegraph calls this “a surreal blunder [that] raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming.”

In this account, the institute had to make the humiliating climb-down after two leading skeptics of the global-warming scam, Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Steve McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst, discovered that temperature readings from September had been carried over and repeated for October. We should sigh, shrug and give the scientists at NASA the benefit of the doubt that this was a mistake and not a deliberate howl at the moon. A spokesman for the institute explains that readings borrowed from Russia, which had been described as 10 degrees higher than normal for October, distorted the figures but, after all, the data had been obtained from others. So we should blame someone else.

This is the science we’re expected to take on faith. This sets a new standard for hubris, arrogance and haughty self-importance. Skeptics of the global-warming scam, even those with unquestioned academic and real-world credentials, are treated as ignorant pariahs by pundits, presidential candidates and other politicians who know better, or ought to. Read more here.

The Washinton Times article by Kelly Hearn US dealing with security concerns from change in climate stated the following: “Coastal military facilities are threatened by rising sea levels and more frequent major, damaging weather events such as hurricanes and Tornadoes. Although Mr. Fingar declined to give details apart from the number of installations in peril, a Pentagon official told The Washington Times that the Pentagon has commissioned a network of scientists to create a model for predicting the impact of storm surges and sea-level rises on military facilities on the Gulf Coast, in the Mid-Atlantic region and in Southern California.

Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant made the following News Blog concerning this issue: “Coastal military facilities are threatened by rising sea levels, Really?”

See larger image here

The above graph is S.J.Holgate’s reconstruction of the rate of sea level rise rate the 20th century obtained from the highest quality tide gauge data in his 2007 GRL paper. The IPCC’s 4th assessment report (2007) only mentioned Holgate’s 2004 data and ignored his 2007 data (shown in the above graph). In his 2007 paper, Holgate says: “…the two highest decadal rates of change were recorded in the decades centered on 1980 (5.31 mm/yr) and 1939 (4.68 mm/yr) with the most negative decadal rates of change over the past 100 years during the decades centered on 1964 (-1.49 mm/yr) and 1987 (-1.33 mm/yr). There were also significant high decadal rates of change during the late 1910s, 1950s and 1990s. Negative decadal rates of change are seen in the early 1920s and early 1970s.” So, where is the evidence for an increase to sea level rate of rise that would threaten coastal military installations? It is not found in the observed seal level changes.

And “Coastal military facilities are threatened by more frequent major, damaging weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes.” Really? The article titled “30 -year low for N. Hemisphere tropical cyclone activity” seems pertinent and is at all the article deserves reading, but it begins saying: “The past two years have seen a “remarkable” downturn in hurricane activity, contradicting predictions of more storms, researchers at Florida State University say. The 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years, according to Ryan Maue, co-author of a report on Global Tropical Cyclone Activity. “Even though North Atlantic hurricane activity was expectedly above normal, the Western and Eastern Pacific basins have produced considerably fewer than normal typhoons and hurricanes,” he said. See full post here.

How have we come to a situation where, as some polls suggest, most Australians are so concerned about dangerous climate change that they will put aside the very tools and technologies that have sustained clean air, clean water, nutritious food and long life? More importantly, is the perceived danger real and will the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions avert the perceived danger? Although there are many uncertainties to be resolved, it is clear that the community has been the subject of more than two decades of heavily biased propaganda.

In spite of claims to the contrary, there is no consensus of scientists supporting the findings and recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There exists a large and vocal group of highly qualified dissenters (often denigrated as sceptics, deniers or worse). In the absence of computer models there would be little credence given to the view that the relatively small warming of the second half of the twentieth century was due to carbon dioxide emissions; there would certainly be no credence given to the possibility of irreversible runaway global warming over the coming century.

Cool heads would note that most of the earth’s surface is either ocean or freely transpiring vegetation and that surface evaporation will continue to constrain surface temperature rise, as it always has done.  The likely magnitude of human-caused global warming is so low that it will not be discernible against the background of natural variability in the climate record. Thus national or internationally co-ordinated efforts to impose carbon dioxide emission reduction for the purpose of preventing climate change will be a tremendous waste of resources.

The real danger is that government-instigated measures to drastically downsize a wide range of fossil-fuel-dependent industries in order to achieve emission reduction targets will actually be effective. Such success will destroy jobs and will limit future development opportunities, with no discernible impact on climate. Then the government will realise that it is much easier to change the economy than to change the climate, and it will also find that the direction and impacts of change will be equally unpredictable.

Atmospheric scientist William Kininmonth is the former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre. He was an Australian representative and consultant to the World Meteorological Organization on climate issues and is the author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard (Multi-science Publishing Co., 2004). He will be among the speakers at the Australian Environment Foundation’s annual conference, “A Climate for Change”, in Canberra this month.

European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that occurred until 2002 is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the “global warming planetary emergency” into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government. 

Leftist commentator, Alexander Cockburn, put it this way: This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice [liberal fascism].

For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet") economic system.  We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a “sustainable” political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils - real and imagined - in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value.  Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.

Given just a decade or two of such “sustainable” policies, bolstered by Gore’s religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds.  The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists’ claims and policies.  They should come to grasp the terrible costs and futility of the left’s policies; they must understand that life lived as the left envision it for them and their children is baneful; life lived in submission to the hard natural forces of climate and disease, increasingly lived without labor-saving technology, without the fruits of sophisticated agricultural techniques, and without modern medicine, sanitation, electrification and transportation systems is, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

The destructive outcomes of policies advocated by the EDF for the non-problem of modest global warming will also be inflicted on Americans, and not only will it fail “them” in the Third World, but will malevolently fail us, too. Read much more here.

Recently I was looking at some graphical temperature data from NASA. I was able to find a graph of United States temperature from 1880 up to 1999. I then went to the NASA GISS site and found the most recent plot of this data. I wanted to compare the two and see if there had been any changes in the trends. Each graph was on a different scale so I had to fit one to the other so they could be compared. After that I saved each image and opened them each in a simple paint program. In this way I could toggle between the two and visually see any changes that might have taken place.

See PPT PDF to toggle back and forth using forward and back arrows

Well it was quite an eye opener! Going back and forth between the images there is a clear cooling the temperatures before 1970 and a clear warming of the temperatures after 1970. It is unmistakable and quite remarkable. Figure one is the temperature data from 1880 to 1999. Figure two shows the most recent plot. I suggest you save each image in your computer then bring them back up in some program that allows you to toggle rapidly back and forth so you can see the changes.

We all know that Dr. James Hansen is one of the worlds most visible global warming alarmists. He is also caretaker of the NASA GISS data. It would appear that he is not happy with the trend of temperature in the United States. It would also appear that he is doing something about it. By adjusting temperatures in the past downward and adjusting more recent temperatures upward we get an amplification (or at least the appearance of one) of the rise in temperature between the late 1970s and the late 1990s. If these adjustments continue we will eventually have a new “Hockey Stick” graph. The old Hockey Stick has been broken and thrown away by most although Dr. Mann is attempting to duct tape it back together again. Now Dr. Hansen is gradually fashioning a new stick by adjusting the United States temperatures more to his liking.

On September 13th , 2008 I wrote a letter to Dr. Hansen’s boss at NASA Michael Griffin explaining my dissatisfaction of having Dr. Hansen in charge of the very data that is used to support his alarmist point of view. To date I have not received a reply.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, just released its report on the status of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology and its view of the technology’s future development challenges. In general, the GAO concludes that the technology faces grave technological, regulatory, economic, and legal barriers that will not be easily overcome. This is the first time a government agency has come clean on CCS and shown it not to be the panacea for greenhouse gas regulation, as it is often painted by opponents of coal-fired power generation.

Many opponents of coal-fired generation have intervened in recent plant regulatory permit hearings touting CCS as a “tried and proven technology” that should be written into permits as best available control technology for CO2 control. In a minority of instances, regulators and the courts have agreed. The GAO report injects a large dose of reality into discussions that often deliberately mischaracterize the commercial status of CCS technology. CCS has many major hurdles to clear before the combined technology is ready for prime time.

The GAO report correctly states that CCS is much more than just figuratively sweeping the CO2 under a rug. CCS is composed of five distinct process steps: capture carbon and compress it into liquid CO2; transport the liquid CO2 to a storage location; inject and store it deep underground; monitor it over the long term to verify that the CO2 stays put, and conduct remedial measures in case leakage occurs. Each of these steps has its own technology challenges, risks, development schedule, and cost implications. The chain fails when the weak link fails.

I observe that most of the current work on CCS revolves around the capture and compression technology portion of the CCS chain, followed by some work on geology and minor pilot injection tests. Virtually no significant work is under way on interstate or cross-border CO2 pipeline issues (it takes a decade or more to permit an interstate natural gas pipeline), monitoring and leakage characterization, or remediation plans when, not if, a CO2 leak occurs. The general public is unable to grasp the details of nuclear technology after decades of discussion, so why should CCS be different? It will only take a single CO2 leak that kills a forest or turns a valuable aquifer into sparkling soda water to turn the public squarely against sequestrating CO2 .

In the context of adding CCS to new integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) plants, the GAO report notes that, “The cost of electricity production would increase by 35% for newly constructed IGCC plants with CO2 capture, compared to a 77% increase for newly constructed pulverized coal power plants equipped with CO2 capture.” To their credit, the GAO report authors go on to chide the Department of Energy for its hyperfocus on IGCC carbon capture and call on it to pay more attention to the technology challenges and costs of retrofitting our existing fleet of coal-fired steam power plants. “The outlook for widespread deployment of IGCC technology is questionable and the agency’s [DOE] funding related to IGCC technology has substantially exceeded funding for technologies more applicable to reducing emissions from existing coal-fired power plants.”

The cost of retrofitting conventional plants will clearly be much higher than installing a CCS system on the tail pipe of an IGCC plant designed as a greenfield project. To put these costs into perspective, American Electric Power’s recent estimates for its 600-MW IGCC plant planned for Ohio is $2 billion - and that plant is described as just carbon capture capable. Read more here.