This is a supplement to the On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding Abridged Research Report of June 2017 New Research Report. This post contains some of the same charts and some new ones.
Meanwhile, the NRDC comes out with another report that will fail like all their prior scares. They claim that heat deaths will explode unless we redistribute our wealth as prescribed by the Paris Accord. Heat extremes have been forecast for decades to be increasing and if listen to the media, you would believe it has. CEI takes them to task for their alarmist hype here.
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Here is my take on it.
The fact is heat has been declining for decades using real data.
Iowa State University Mesonet posted this chart showing that for many areas through July 4th, the number of 90F+ days relative to the 1981-2016 to date average is below normal (so far) in 2017 in many areas, especially the southeast.
Which reflects the EPA Heat Wave Index annual plots since 1895 (Kunkel) and the number of decadal all time state records (Christy).
EPA Depiction of Heat Wave Index (Kunkel) Since 1890
Enlarged
This agrees with the plot of all-time state record high (and low) temperatures (Christy). The 1930s had 23 of the 50 state all time heat records and there were 38 before 1960 with more record lows than highs since the 1940s.
Precipitation has increased slightly and with better farm practices and hybrids and increasing amounts of the plant fertilizer CO2, lead to record crop yields. Even in droughty summers like 2012, yields were 50% higher than a similar drought in 1988.
I have been a part of a team of scientists, econometricians and lawyers who have been working pro-bono in the last decade to fight against harmful, unnecessary regulations based on bad science. A second in the latest research report (first full abridged version (here) was described here) is coming out next week.
The pause in global warming has reached 20 years. The responses the last decade have been to try and adjust the data the better fit the models. This goes against the scientific method.
But with persistence from the skeptics and a whistleblower at NCDC calling Tom Karl on the data manipulation, alarmists appear now to be taking a different tack. In the last few weeks, papers from some of the warmists are agreeing their models are failing due to natural variability - many of the same findings we have reported on Icecap in recent years and in the chapters I did for Elsevier’s Evidence Based Climate Change and lately in the research report. One by some of the top alarmists (here) says:
Here we show that state-of-the-art global models used to predict climate fail to adequately reproduce such multidecadal climate variations. In particular, the models underestimate the magnitude of variability in the twentieth century.
I have also worked with Peter Lanzillo and the team at Hudson Cable to with other participants do a series on the climate issues. Part 1 was on CO2, the Demon Gas (showing CO2 is a trace, highly beneficial gas). Part 2 was on Taking the Earth’s Temperature (looking at all the serious issues attempting to estimate global temperatures and showing how the data has been adjusted always in a way to cause more apparent warming and better agreement with the climate models). In part 3, we were joined by another analyst to look at Extreme Weather (showing how all the predicted increases in the severity and frequency of severe weather has failed to materialize). In part 4, we looked at the natural and other man-made factors that do explain what the greenhouse gas theory can’t. Part 5, I was again joined by another analyst and we looked at the folly of a race to renewables (with a lot of attention to wind), strong regulations and taxes that have hurt our economy, small business and caused electricity prices to skyrocket.
Enlarged. Highest electricity cost states (March 2017 shown). The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) states and California top the list of the lower 48 states.
RGGI states in Green.
We just finished part 6 on CO2 and sea level with Tom Wysmuller and part 7 on the Scientific Method abuses and the role of the media and our education system in indoctrinating young people and helping influence public opinion with Dr. Larry Gould.
Here was Show 4:
All of the research reports and the 7 hours of video have been done pro bono. If you DONATE to ICECAP we will send you links to all our shows. If you would like to discuss getting the series on you local cable access channels contact Peter Lanzillo here.
Why do we go to all this trouble. The answer is that the regulations, green agenda and the Paris Accord will cause great pain with no benefit - especially for those that can afford it the least.
The United Nation’s former global warming czar has published a paper claiming humanity only has three years left to avert dangerous global warming and meet the goals of the Paris climate accord.
To do that, Christiana Figueres says governments and businesses need to pony up $1.3 trillion a year by 2020 earmarked for “climate action” to decarbonize the global economy. That’s on top of boosting green energy and phasing out fossil fuels, mostly coal.
“[S]hould emissions continue to rise beyond 2020, or even remain level, the temperature goals set in Paris become almost unattainable, Figueres, the former head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, wrote in an article published in Nature. “The UN Sustainable Development Goals that were agreed in 2015 would also be at grave risk.”
“These goals may be idealistic at best, unrealistic at worst. However, we are in the age of exponential transformation and think that such a focus will unleash ingenuity,” Figueres wrote in her article, which was co-authored by a few environmentalists and scientists.
The Paris accord aims to “significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” by keeping global warming “well below” two degrees Celsius by 2100. Beyond that, many activist scientists say global warming poses a danger to humanity.
World leaders are set to meet at the G20 summit in July, and Figueres wants them to “highlight the importance of the 2020 climate turning point for greenhouse-gas emissions’’ by imposing more policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and putting up more money for climate programs.
Figueres isn’t the first to propose a costly plan to limit future global warming. A group associated with former Vice President Al Gore issued a report in April calling for $15 trillion to be spent on green energy and other programs to limit global warming.
The Gore-affiliated Energy Transitions Commission’s (ETC) called for “investment in renewables and other low-carbon technologies some $6 trillion higher ($300 billion per year); while the largest required increases - of almost $9 trillion ($450 billion per year) - will be in more efficient energy saving equipment and buildings.”
A recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance report estimated $12.7 trillion was needed to keep projected global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The report estimated $7.4 trillion will be invested in new green energy capacity by 2040, adding a “further $5.3 trillion investment in 3.9 [terawatts] of zero-carbon capacity would be consistent with keeping the planet on a 2-degrees-C trajectory.”
Figueres calls for about $1.3 trillion a year to fight global warming by 2020. So the actual cost of her plan is likely on par or higher than those suggested outlined by the Gore group and Bloomberg.
“[P]lans to fully decarbonize buildings and infrastructures by 2050, with funding of $300 billion annually,” she wrote, adding the “financial sector has rethought how it deploys capital and is mobilizing at least $1 trillion a year for climate action.”
That includes issuing “green bonds” to finance climate programs.
The world would need to get 30 percent of its electricity from green sources, electric vehicles would need to be 15 percent of the global vehicle fleet and reduce deforestation, wrote Figueres and company.
Even when environmentalists admit wind power is more expensive than conventional fuel sources - and they often lie and claim it isn’t - wind advocates argue its environmental benefits are worth the added costs.
A recent column by noted British science writer Matt Ridley in The Spectator puts lie to this myth. To the extent one supplants electricity generated by fossil fuels with wind-generated electricity, it does relatively little to protect the environment.
For all the bragging the wind industry does about the growth of wind power worldwide - and to be fair, due to huge subsidies, it has been growing at an impressive pace for a decade now - it still doesn’t amount to much as a share of power overall.
According to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2016 Key Renewables Trends, wind provided 0.46 percent of global energy consumption in 2014. This is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than one-fifth of all energy used. Even limiting the question to electricity, all renewable-energy sources combined provided approximately 22 percent of electric power worldwide in 2012, a share the Energy Information Agency expects to grow to about 30 percent by 2040.
The problem for wind proponents is despite all the subsidies and mandates and the use of its punier but even more expensive cousin, solar power, wind and solar together only make up less than 5 percent of all global electric-power use, an amount EIA estimates will grow to 14 percent by 2040. Since electric power is just 20 percent of total energy use, even in 2040, electric and solar power will provide a mere fraction of the world’s total energy supply. Hydropower and old fashioned biomass - which, for most of us, means burning wood for heat and cooking - dominate the renewable energy supply.
The land, wildlife, and climate impacts of this push for wind are horrendous. Ridley points out IEA estimates world energy demand has been growing at about 2 percent each year for nearly 40 years, an amount of annual growth that is expected to continue for decades to come.
If wind turbines were to supply just the expected growth in energy demand for the next 50 years, wind turbines would need to cover an amount of land equal to Russia, the largest country on Earth, in terms of land mass - and that’s just to meet new demand not displace the huge amounts of fossil fuels we currently use.
But even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Because wind turbines must be placed where the wind blows fairly constantly and without obstruction, wind farms often gobble up particularly scenic land areas, such as the tops of mountains and other remote areas. These places are typically hundreds of miles from the growing urban areas that need the power, necessitating the construction of tens of thousands of miles of new power lines to transport the electricity from where the turbines are spinning to where the power is needed. Power lines, of course, also take up land.
Other power plants, by comparison, can be constructed next to existing power-line corridors or near the areas where the power is needed. In addition, because electric power is lost during transmission over great distances, not all the power generated by turbines reaches its intended destination, which means more turbines and land is needed to meet electric power growth.
To put this in perspective, two of the biggest wind farms in Europe have 159 turbines and cover thousands of acres, but together, they take a year to produce less than four days’ worth of output from a single 2,000 MW conventional power station that takes up 100 times fewer acres. A wind farm occupying 192,000 acres, approximately 300 square miles, would produce the same amount of energy as a single 1,000 MW nuclear plant that requires less than 1,700 acres, or 2.65 square miles.
Wind turbines have been rightly called the Cuisinarts of the air for their propensity to chew up thousands of migratory birds and bats every year. In the 1960s, Rachel Carson warned of a ‘silent spring,’ when children would no longer hear whistles of song birds because they had been killed by modern pesticides. Carson was wrong about the cause of death, but if wind farms are built around the world in the numbers demanded by climate alarmists, she could well be right about the results. Millions more birds and bats will be killed in the future by spinning turbines built in the corridors through which birds and bats migrate.
And what do we get for all this death and destruction? Certainly not cleaner air or lower carbon-dioxide emissions.
Wind farms generate power only when the wind is blowing within a certain range of speed. When there is too little wind, wind towers don’t generate power, but when the wind is too strong, they must be shut down for fear of being blown down. Even when they function properly, wind farms’ average output is less than 30 percent of their theoretical capacity, compared to 85 - 95 percent for combined-cycle gas-fired plants. Additionally, the power wind farms produce is highly variable, ramping up and down quickly alongside gusts and lulls. This is problematic because the power grid needs a regulated flow of power to function properly.
Because of these two endemic facts about wind power, wind farms require conventional power plants to supplement the power they do supply. By building a 1,000 MW wind farm, you are essentially also requiring the presence of a 700 MW natural-gas power plant.
It should also be noted the production of steel and concrete needed to build massive wind farms require energy-intensive processes, emitting greater amounts of carbon dioxide than most other industries. In fact, wind turbines require more steel and concrete per unit of energy produced than any other source of electricity.
As Ridley recounts for The Spectator, wind turbines need about 200 times more material per unit of power generated than a modern combined-cycle gas turbine. That means a single two-megawatt wind turbine uses 150 tons of coal. Building and installing the 350,000 wind turbines every year needed to keep up with increasing energy demand would require using 50 million additional tons of coal per year.
By any measure, governments’ big push for wind power delivers very little in terms of energy or environmental protection. Wind power advocates are blowhards, and it’s time for governments to stop listening to them.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hburnett@heartland.org) is a research fellow on energy and the environment at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois.
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See this video, one segment of a multi-part series on climate theory, reality and the environmental and economic factors.
Sadly The Weather Channel long ago forgot what they were all about and began under then Uber leftist CEO Decker Anstrom and climate evangelist Heidi Cullen to play up environmental advocacy instead providing ‘weather when you need it’. The ratings began a decline because of that (most meteorologists were smarter than to buy the scare) and the fact other technologies have increasingly replaced television and cable as the source of information, especially with the young.
John Coleman, the original idea man for TWC and I as his assistant at GMA and then First Director of Meteorology when it launched are appalled at Weather.com stories that attack groups and states that resist the indoctrination of our young people (see here and here).
Also repellent to anyone with a brain is the democratic assault on the administration for backing out of the Paris, a redistribution of wealth scheme that was part of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 195 countries agreed to this agreement non-binding on them and amounts to a transfer of wealth from the industrialized west (especially the US) as part of the ‘UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Environment’.
According to a study by NERA Consulting, the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs, including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs. 195 countries agreed to this agreement non-binding on them and amounts to a transfer of wealth from US (part of UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Environment). It despite great pain on hard working people in the west, it would even with their own failing greenhouse models have no measurable affect on climate by 2100.
In a new Rasmussen poll, 41% of Americans don’t want to pay anything out of pocket or in taxes for climate change control, 22% would be willing to pay a small amount ($2/week). It is the latest sure to fail progressive idea like the ACA which promised only benefits and savings and cost American families an average of $3000/month for health care with higher deductibles and could not in many cases keep their doctor or their health plan). But like with the ACA, most media including the Weather Channel and all democrats (national, many state and local) and most universities are pushing the Paris Accord. They are in a sense ‘Grubering’ the public (MIT’s Gruber, an ACA planner and message coordinator said they had to make those promises to get public approval and they knew it would work because the public was ‘stupid’.
None other than Hitler’s master propagandist Joseph Goebbels provided the blueprint for the democratic and deep state, progressives in the NGOS and Universities and the media (including TWC and even ESPN) policy on so many issues:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
This past week, four democratic senators attacked the Heartland for attempting to provide information dearly needed by teachers in the classroom to provide a balanced curriculum on weather and climate. Heartland which has been attacked for their work had enough and replied. This was reported in Weather.com which attacked Heartland. Ironically, the left including the media often accuse Trump and the republicans of being modern day Nazis, a classic example of projection.
It is almost unbelievable how low our opponents stoop in their effort to demonize us and stop President Trump from repealing the worst parts of Barack Obama’s legacy.
As you may have heard, I was in the Rose Garden a week ago when President Trump announced the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty. I was honored to be invited, and view it as a sign that our efforts for the past 20 years on the climate change issue have not gone unnoticed. But the left noticed my attendance as well, and so this week they tried to hurt President Trump by attacking me.
The Union of Concerned Scientists and other left-wing groups shivered and cried about my presence in the Rose Garden. Forget about them. More interesting was this letter to U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos signed by four U.S. Senators, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Edward Markey (D-MA) - demanding to know if her department “had contact with individuals associated with the Heartland Institute on climate, science, or science education issues,” and demanding as well copies of said correspondence, any information regarding discussions between Heartland and other White House staff members, and more.
The letter goes on to accuse The Heartland Institute of being a “notorious industry front group,” and worse.
Below is my reply to the four senators, going out in the mail today. I hope you don’t think it’s too timid.
We are not letting up on our efforts to spread the truth about climate change and other important public policy issues. Stay tuned for more news on that front.
START OF LETTER
June 8, 2017
To: Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Brian Schatz (D-HI), and Edward Markey (D-MA)
From: Joseph L. Bast, president The Heartland Institute
Re: Your recent shameful conduct with regard to our communications with the Trump administration
I was disappointed but not surprised by your letter dated June 7 sent to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in which you demand to know if her department “had contact with individuals associated with the Heartland Institute on climate, science, or science education issues,” and demanding as well copies of said correspondence, any information regarding discussions between Heartland and other White House staff members, and more.
For the record, The Heartland Institute has contacted nearly all members of the Trump cabinet. We have sent extensive information to more than 100 members of the administration explaining who we are, enclosing multiple publications (including books, policy studies, and videos) of most relevance to their positions, and offering to make our extensive network of some 370 policy experts available to provide further assistance. Some have gotten back to us.
We have published scores, possibly more than one hundred, commentaries and news releases and news stories calling attention to the new administration’s policy decisions, congratulating it when it has done what we believe to be the right things, and criticizing it when they have come up short.
Can any of you explain to me how this differs from the relationship the previous administration had with liberal advocacy groups? Can any of you explain why these contacts are illegitimate or against the public interest?
Your letter to Secretary DeVos describes The Heartland Institute as a “notorious industry front group.” This is false and defamatory. Heartland is a 33-year-old national nonprofit research and education organization with a broad funding base, a long history of taking positions at odds with “industry,” and has policies in place that protect its staff from undue influence from donors. All this is explained on our website in a section titled “Reply to Our Critics.” Google it.
Your letter cites PBS Frontline as reporting “that the Heartland Institute is distributing factually inaccurate and scientifically illegitimate materials on climate change to upwards of 200,000 public school science teachers.” PBS Frontline is not qualified to make that judgment. And the number of public school science teachers is considerably less than 200,000. Didn’t anyone on your staffs fact-check this letter before it was circulated?
Our work on climate change is produced by a network of more than 200 highly qualified scientists, economists, and policy experts. It has been cited in more than one hundred peer-reviewed articles. The Chinese Academy of Sciences thought so highly of it, it translated two volumes of our work into Mandarin Chinese and published it as a condensed volume in 2013. Surveys and literature reviews show our views are supported by a majority of scientists in the United States.
Your letter goes on to claim that Heartland has “disseminated ‘alternative facts’ and fake science at the behest of its industry funders for decades.” You go on to comment on our funding from Phillip Morris, the Koch family foundations, and ExxonMobil, implying that our work may be “fraudulent.”
It is simply despicable that you would knowingly repeat such lies in an open letter like this. Shame, shame, shame.
The Heartland Institute’s research has been praised by scores of policymakers and our peers in the public policy research community. (See the document titled “Endorsements” linked in the “About” feature on our Website.) We are ranked one of the top ten conservative think tanks in the world. The Koch family has made exactly one gift to us in the past 20 years, of only $25,000 earmarked for a health care policy project. ExxonMobil stopped giving in 2007, before Heartland ramped up its work on climate change. Your claims are false, obviously intended to defame us.
But of course you know all this, because I’ve told you this before in response to previous libelous letters you’ve sent. Frankly, your letter is a monumental misuse of your offices and a betrayal of the trust of your constituents. You should all be ashamed.
Happily, it now appears our work is informing the decisions of the Trump administration, conscientious members of the U.S. House and Senate, and governors and state elected officials from coast to coast. I understand this is bad for you, but it is good for the nation, for the environment, and for us.
I eagerly await your retractions and apologies.
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Good letter Joe. Keep up the fine work. By the way, I will post a series of 5 one hour shows I did on local cable in upcoming days. Here is an unedited example of one show.
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