The Arctic invasion that recently swept the United States was truly historic, and the record books prove it. First see this NOAA February map and the very large areas with -12F or greater cold anomalies in pink.
For the nation, it was the 19th-coldest February in the 127-year record. The nation’s monthly average temperature of 30.6F was 3.2F below the 1901-2000 mean, the coldest February since 1989 and fifth coldest since the end of the Dust Bowl era, behind 1960, 1978, 1979, and 1989.
According to NOAA, 10,127 record low mins and maxes were observed, 703 monthly record low maxes and mins and 200 all time record low maxes and mins (year -to-date) dating back 100+ years. Note also the 3514 record snow reports too this year to date.
Dalles has ts coldest ever three day assault, beating out 1983 and the incredible 1899.
A new all-time never-before-witnessed benchmarks often in record books dating back 100+ years.
NOAA said the “cold snap” peaked between Feb. 14-16, during which time approximately 30% of available U.S. sites set cold-maximum records, and about 20% set cold-minimum records:
The severity of the polar cold was extreme, unexpected, and ill-prepared for the western world has been instructed to brace for catastrophic warming for going on 4 decades now:
Meteorological Analysis
Three weeks ago, a major cold snap and series of winter storms enveloped the southern plains and parts of the Mississippi River Valley, sending temperatures below zero as far south as central Texas. According to NOAA NCEI, a total of 8,632 daily record low temperatures - including both maximums and minimums - were set or tied from February 10-20, as opposed to only 262 daily warm records. Additionally, a whopping 693 monthly record lows were set, 199 of which were all-Time record lows.
According to the NOAA Weather Prediction Center, over 30% of all of the official weather stations in the United States set at least record low maximum temperatures between February 14 and 16. Without a doubt, this was the coldest 10-day period that this part of the country had experienced in over a century.
The animation HERE conveys just how widespread the cold was between February 10 and 20. Locations approaching or surpassing daily, monthly, and/or all-time record lows; February 10-20, 2021 - coolwx.com.
While no statewide records were broken, some of the records that were reported were quite shocking to say the least. The two coldest days were Monday, February 15 and Tuesday, February 16, where temperatures were some 40-50F below average across Oklahoma and Texas. Between February 11 and 18, temperatures across much of the Heartland averaged some 30F below average (Figure 2). Temperatures this cold for such a sustained period can lower the monthly and seasonal average by a wide margin.
Figure 2: 7-day 2 meter air temperature anomaly (F) with contour lines labeled; February 11-18.
On Monday, February 15, Oklahoma City only rose to 4F (-15.6C), which was colder than the daily record low of 7F (-13.9C) set in 1909! San Angelo, Texas dipped to a bone-chilling -1F (-18.3C), which tied with December 29, 1983 and February 2, 1985 for the city’s second coldest temperature, only behind the reading of -4’F (-20C) set on December 23, 1989. That was also the only subzero reading for the date, smashing the old record of 16F (-8.9C) from 1909. Houston, Texas dipped to 16F on Monday the 15, which was their coldest temperature since December 24, 1989, when it plunged to 11F (-11.7C). That also broke the old daily record of 18F (-7.8C) from 1918.
Kansas City, Missouri plunged down to -10F (-23.3C), breaking the old record of -6F (-21.1C) from 1936, while the high of -1F smashed the old record of 8F (-13.3C) from 1900. According to the local National Weather Service office, a wind chill of -32F (-35.6C) was recorded, the coldest wind chill there since 1989.
The following morning, Tuesday, February 16, even more notable record lows were set. Oklahoma City once again set a record low, this time falling to a jaw-dropping -14F (-25.6C), which not only obliterated the old daily record of 4F (-15.6C) set in 1903, it was the coldest reading there in over 120 years, only second to the -17F (-27.2C) recorded on February 12, 1899. Oklahoma City also recorded its longest stretch of temperatures at or below 20F (-6.7C), at 210 consecutive hours, surpassing 1983. Meanwhile, Tulsa dropped to -13F (-25C), tying the city’s coldest temperature on record, originally set on January 12, 1918.
Dallas, Texas even dipped to -2F (-18.9C), which matched January 31, 1949 for the second coldest temperature ever recorded there, just behind February 12, 1899, when it dipped to a bone-chilling -8F (-22.2C). Tyler, Texas broke their all-time coldest temperature of -3F (-19.4C) from January 18, 1930, dipping to six below zero. Hastings, Nebraska tied their all-time coldest temperature of -30F (-34.4C), originally set on January 12, 1912. It also obliterated the old daily record low of -13F set in 1979.
In Arkansas, Fayetteville fell to -20F (-28.9C), which not only anihilated the old record of 7F from both 1958 and 2007, it was their all-time coldest temperature, and only nine degrees short of the statewide record set on February 13, 1905 in Gravette.
Perhaps the most impressive record that was set was in Bottineau, North Dakota, approximately ten miles from the Canadian border. On the morning of February 13, the mercury dove to an incomprehensible -51F (-46.1C), which not only crushed the previous daily record of -37F (-38.3C) from 1936, it also broke the towns prior all-time record low of -50F (-45.6C) set on February 3, 1893, a record that stood for over 128 years! This reading was only nine degrees off the statewide record, set on February 15, 1936 in Parshall. Other impressive readings were temperatures as low as minus 20 as far south as northern Texas.
Now that we have flipped the calendar to March, to really shed some light on how large of an impression the Arctic outbreak had on the monthly outcome, last month was the coldest by departure from average in the Continental United States since December 2000 (Figure 3) and third coldest since December 1989.
Figure 3. PRISM temperature anomaly analysis for February 2021 - weathermodels.com.
Major cold snaps that impact the southern plains all share similar characteristics with respect to their meteorological evolution. While the event itself was arguably predictable with moderate confidence as early as two weeks out, something my friend meteorologist Joe Bastardi over at WeatherBELL.com was very bullish -and ultimately correct - on from over ten days out, the threat for such cold became elevated within weeks following the sudden stratospheric warming event which was the primary cause of the stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) displacement.
Winter Rolls on for Denver
By the way, a blizzard left behind 27.1 inches of snow in Denver this weekend, the 4th largest snow in the history back to 1881.
Also see A CLIMATE AND ENERGY PRIMER FOR POLITICIANS AND MEDIA by contributing author Allan MacRae Allan is a highly respected energy leader in Canada who has worked with true climate experts and has helped make Alberta the shining star of Canadian energy over the decades. There too the politicians and media and the public have been programmed by false claims and green energy frauds and are willing to toss the low cost clean fossil fuel energy legacy out and replace it with unreliable and expensive green energy. Greens expect population to adapt its consumption to the available supply and simply come to accept rationing and power interruptions, of the sort that are unfortunately still common in underdeveloped countries. They insist that is the necessary price for averting the phoney climate apocalypse.
This week Myron Ebell (director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) and Steven J. Milloy published a post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog titled ”Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions:”
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science. While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.
The first 27 failed alarmist predictions below are from the CEI post (many were previously collected and posted by Tony Heller on RealClimateScience, see Tony’s video below) and the additional 14 doomsday predictions the climate alarmists got wrong were added by John Nolte in a Breitbart post titled “Climate ‘Experts’ are 0-41 with Their Doomsday Predictions”:
For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong. In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent ...and it never happened. And not once - not even once! - have these alarmists had one of their predictions come true.
Think about that...the so-called experts are 0-41 with their predictions, but those of us who are skeptical of “expert” prediction number 42, the one that says that if we don’t immediately convert to socialism and allow Alexandria Ocasio-Crazy to control and organize our lives, the planet will become uninhabitable. Why would any sane person listen to someone with a 0-41 record? Why would we completely restructure our economy and sacrifice our personal freedom for “experts” who are 0-41, who have never once gotten it right? And if that’s not crazy enough, the latest ploy is to trot out a 16-year-old girl to spread prediction number 42, because it is so much more credible that way.
Below are the 41 failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions (with links):
1.1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
2.1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
3.1970: Ice Age By 2000
4.1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
5.1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
6.1972: New Ice Age By 2070
7.1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
8.1974: Another Ice Age?
9.1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’
10.1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
11.1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link)
12 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link)
13.1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
14.1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
15.1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not)
16.1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
17.1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not)
18.2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is
19.2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
20.2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
21.2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
22.2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
23.2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
24.2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to “Save The Planet From Catastrophe”
25.2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
26.2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link)
27.2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’
28.1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
29.1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
30.1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
31.1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
32.1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s
33.1980: Peak Oil In 2000
34.1996: Peak Oil in 2020
35.2002: Peak Oil in 2010
36.2006: Super Hurricanes!
37.2005: Manhattan Underwater by 2015
38.1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
39.1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
40.1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
41.1970s: Killer Bees!
Update: I’ve added 9 additional failed predictions (via Real Climate Science) below to make it an even 50 for the number of failed eco-pocalyptic doomsday predictions over the last 50 years.
42.1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production
43.1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century
44.1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum
45.1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980
46.1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018
47.2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020
48.2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past
49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming
50.2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter
But somehow this time will be different, and the ‘experts’ and 16-year olds of today will suddenly be correct in their new predictions of eco-doom and eco-disaster? Not.
Related: Bonus video below from Tony Heller titled “My Gift To Climate Alarmists,” which he describes as “my most concise expose of climate fraud.”
Mark J. Perry
Mark J. Perry is a Professor of Economics and Finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of The University of Michigan, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and finance since 1996. Starting in the fall of 2009, Perry has also held a joint appointment as a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he has been a regular contributor to the AEIdeas blog. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University and in addition, and has an MBA degree in finance from The University of Minnesota.
See also Dr. john Happs’ version of ‘In their own words” and the sinister motivations of the Beneficiaries Of The Climate Fraud: Green Groups, Scientists And Politicians here.
On Wednesday, a short item in the Federal Register underscored the regressive nature of the “everything” effort that is being promoted by some of America’s highest-profile environmental groups, climate-change activists, politicians, and academics. The item, published by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy, forecasts the “representative average unit costs of five residential energy sources for the year 2021.”
The forecast shows that on an energy-equivalent basis, electricity will cost about $39 per million Btu. It also projects that one million Btu in the form of natural gas will cost about $11, propane will cost about $19, No. 2 heating oil will cost $20, and kerosene will cost $23. Thus, electricity will cost nearly four times as much as natural gas and twice as much as propane, a fuel that is commonly used by rural Americans in their homes, and on their farms and ranches.
The electrify everything push will impose regressive energy taxes on low-income consumers.
As I wrote in these pages last month during the deadly blizzard that paralyzed Texas for almost a week, there are a myriad of problems with attempting to electrify all of our transportation, industrial and residential energy systems. I wrote, “attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if - or rather, when - a widespread or extended blackout occurs.”
Indeed, the risks to our energy security, resilience, and reliability are obvious. But the bigger, and more immediate issue is the regressive nature of forcing consumers to use electricity instead of energy sources like natural gas and propane that sell for a quarter, or half, as much as the energy that consumers can get from the electric grid.
Last year, I published a report for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity that looked at the natural gas bans that are being implemented in dozens of communities in California. According to the Sierra Club, 42 California communities have now imposed bans. On its website, the club, which is the largest environmental group in America, claims that gas-free homes are “a win for our climate, health, and safety.” In January, the city of Denver released a plan that aims to ban natural gas connections in new buildings by 2027. In February, the city of Seattle enacted legislation that bans the use of natural gas in new commercial buildings and large multifamily buildings. In Massachusetts, about a dozen towns have partnered with the Rocky Mountain Institute, which recently got a $10 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund, to advocate for the right to ban the use of natural gas in homes and commercial buildings.
Banning natural gas forces consumers to use more-expensive electricity to heat their homes, cook their food, and heat the water needed to wash their clothes and dishes. Proponents of the electrify everything push, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, which got $100 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, prefer to call their efforts “beneficial electrification.” The more accurate term is “forced electrification” because it will increase the energy burden on low- and middle-income consumers.
Increasing the energy burden in states like California, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, is indefensible. When accounting for the cost of living, 18.1% of the state’s residents are living in poverty. Forcing poverty-stricken Californians to use electricity instead of lower-cost natural gas will increase the energy burden and worsen poverty.
Despite these facts, bans on natural gas are being cheered by some of America’s highest-profile climate activists. In January, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org published an article in the New Yorker in which he said if there is a “basic rule of thumb for dealing with the climate crisis, it would be: stop burning things” including natural gas. McKibben says we should shift our energy needs to solar and wind energy. Also in January, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York City will “renounce fossil fuels fully” and “ban fossil fuel connections in the city by the end of this decade.”
In March, Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, declared that policymakers should stop looking at the use of alternative fuels like renewable natural gas because they “distract from the basic task of getting New Yorkers to stop burning things.”
I am pro-electricity. But the idea that we humans should “stop burning things” in the name of climate change ignores the need for energy security, resilience, and basic fairness. Over the past five years, I traveled to India, Iceland, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Colorado, and New York to look at the world through the lens of electricity. I’ve recently published a book (A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations) and co-produced (with my colleague, Tyson Culver) a documentary (Juice: How Electricity Explains the World) that spotlights electricity. The book and film show that we need many terawatts of new generation capacity to bring the 3 billion people in the world who are now living in energy poverty out of the dark and into the bright lights of modernity.
In short, the people of the world need more electricity. Lots more. But the Texas Blackouts proved that we need diverse and resilient energy networks that can deliver huge quantities of energy during extreme weather events. Attempting to electrify everything is a recipe for increased inequality and decreased energy security and resilience.
Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
Robert Bryce is the host of the Power Hungry Podcast. An author and journalist, Bryce has been writing about energy, politics, and the environment for more than 30 years.
Does President Joe Biden really want the United States to cede its hard-won energy independence and leadership position in the world? Because that is precisely what will happen if the president tries to sweep away the inexpensive, reliable forms of energy that have been powering America for decades.
To understand the disaster that awaits the nation if Biden makes good on his pledge to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power, we need only look to California and Texas, two states that have already tried to do exactly that.
Power outages are now commonplace in California. Its troubles are explained by officials who now admit to an over-reliance on wind and solar power. Even the Los Angeles Times reported:
...gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them ...
Consequently, the state has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs. Governor Gavin Newsom admitted, “we failed to predict and plan for these shortages” and took responsibility for the rolling blackouts. Of course, he wants everyone to conserve while they look for new sources of energy. And that energy will have to be supplied by fossil fuel from neighboring states. This, as California continues its misguided intent to transition to 60% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% “climate-friendly energy” by 2045 (which is required by state law). And note, Biden has gone even further and committed to making the nation 100% renewable within 15 years.
And what about Texas, where an over-reliance on wind and solar power was clearly a major reason that millions of Texans shivered in the dark for several days in late February?
In a desperate attempt to support these politically-correct but expensive and unreliable energy sources, major media outlets and left-leaning legislators are trying to convince the public that wind and solar power problems were not a significant factor in the Texas blackout.
On March 3, Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who chairs the subcommittee on Environment of the Committee on Oversight and Reform in the U.S. House of Representatives, which is investigating the Texas blackout, sent a letter to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas in which he wrote:
Despite false claims from Texas officials that the power outages were attributable to renewable sources like wind turbines, the vast majority of the dip in electricity supply came from fossil fuel generation. Renewable sources of energy only make up roughly 10% of power in Texas, while over half of the energy comes from fossil fuels such as power plants fired by natural gas.
In “No, frozen wind turbines aren’t the main culprit for Texas’ power outages,” the February 16 article in Austin’s Texas Tribune, Heather Zichal, CEO of the industry group the American Clean Power Association, complained that opponents of renewable energy were “engaging in a politically opportunistic charade” “to distract from the failures” elsewhere in the system and slow the “transition to a clean energy future.”
‘It is just a lie that wind turbines, ‘green energy’ are the root causes of the problems in Texas right now,” said MSNBC host Chris Hayes on February 16.
And, of course, the Los Angeles Times attacked those who blamed the blackout on an over-reliance on renewables, implying that the Texas deep freeze was caused by, you guessed it, climate change.
The Times were right in one sense: the impossible effort to ‘stop climate change’ did contribute the blackout. Mark Mathis, president of Clear Energy Alliance, explained,
[M]any of natural gas lines froze because ERCOT cut off electricity to those lines, something a report on the 2011 Texas blackout advised them to be careful not to do in any future deep freeze. Why were the pipelines not powered by natural gas? FERC required them to switch from direct gas power to electricity because that was supposed to reduce greenhouse emissions. Natural gas did provide a lot more power when it was needed. It just couldn’t provide enough.
The really big problem was a lack of reserve margin. Texas has a cushion of about 7.5 to 8.5 percent. That’s half of what most electricity markets provide. With so much power coming from unreliable electricity sources the reserve margin should be at least 20 percent, some say even more.
Dr. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow of the Illinois-based Heartland Institute, showed that Rep. Khanna’s statement that “the vast majority of the dip in electricity supply [during the blackout] came from fossil fuel generation” is highly deceptive. In ”Wind and Solar Power Fail When You Need Them the Most, “ he explained that there was practically nothing coming from wind and solar in the days before the cold snap. Burnett wrote:
Data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas shows four days before the first snowflake fell, wind and solar were providing 58 percent of the electric power used in Texas. Fortuitously, the sun had been shining and the wind blowing. These conditions ended, and within a matter of hours more than 13,000 megawatts of wind and solar power went offline. The wind died off and the turbines began to freeze, and winter storm clouds blocked the sun.
As always, natural gas, coal, and nuclear facilities ramped up production when wind and solar failed. Then the storm hit. Even as the wind picked up, ice had formed on the turbines, keeping them offline, and snow and ice coated solar panels, preventing them from generating power. More wind and solar failed, and the cold had a cascading effect on coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Some gas lines froze, other gas, due to contracts, was being shipped out of state, some equipment failed, and some powerlines snapped and transformers broke. More coal, natural gas, and nuclear failed during the storm than wind and solar, but only because wind and solar had failed even before the storm hit. What power remained during the crisis was delivered almost entirely by natural gas, coal, and nuclear. Wind and solar power remained almost wholly offline for the duration.
The following plot from the Energy Information Administration shows this clearly:
The result was inevitable: over eight million Texans (including Burnett), in more than four million homes, lost lights, power, and heat.
At first glance, it appears that gaining useful energy from the sun and the wind should be possible and relatively inexpensive. After all, we have long used the wind to sail boats and grind grain and the sun to heat a multitude of things. Producing electricity from an intermittent source of power is, however, an entirely different matter.
Most people are unaware that the supply of electricity to an electric grid must equal the demand at all times. At any point when this is not the case, the grid will collapse and we have a blackout, such as in Texas. It is not possible for the supply to almost meet demand; it is all or nothing.
On a large electric grid such as that in Texas, the lack of a small amount of solar or wind power can and will and did cause the grid to crash. If all the available supply of natural gas, coal, or nuclear power is at maximum availability but only one percent or less of the online supply of wind and solar becomes unavailable when the wind is not blowing or the turbine is iced up and the sun is not shining or the solar panels are covered with snow, the grid will and did crash.
Mathis stated:
Unreliable wind and solar are destabilizing our electric grid. When power drops quickly as it often does with wind/solar, it must be replaced by natural gas in an instant. Too much wind/solar on the grid makes this challenge unreasonably difficult.
It is amusing that a shortage of natural gas is also being blamed, though well it should. Amusing, because the government has been shutting down gas pipelines, but more amusing yet because of the electric energy rule of thumb coined by Terigi Ciccone and this article’s co-author, Jay Lehr. The rule says:
All solar and wind power on an electric grid must be backed up with an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel power (normally natural gas) on standby 100% of the time ready to go online in seconds.
There are those who think that, eventually, wind and solar power can be successfully backed up by batteries. But, as Dr. David Wojick explained in this podcast, it is clearly not possible now, nor will it be at any time in the foreseeable future.
To defeat wind and solar power, we cannot rely simply on informing the public and policymakers about their extraordinary cost and unreliability. We must also critique the root cause of a huge push for these power sources, namely the nonsensical belief that we can control future climate if we transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar power.
Besides uninformed environmental extremists and anti-Western activists, the push to transition our energy infrastructure has several powerful backers:
The government supports it because they know it will require government rationing as a result of the necessary shortfall in supply. What government does not want more power over its subjects?
The electric energy utilities are also supportive since they get to build more into their systems, charge more for their energy and make a fortune in spare parts and excessive prices when things go badly. How about a $9,000 charge for a kilowatt hour in Texas last month?
Those who build wind and solar installations reap huge financial rewards from the government subsidies that make them economical. The March 15 video from Clear Energy Alliance explains how truly massive these subsidies are:
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the Texas blackout “Shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America.” Even in Montana, where only 900 people lost power for 30 minutes, Rep. Matt Rosendale wrote that the rolling blackouts “demonstrate the dangerous consequences of transitioning away from reliable fossil fuel-based power sources.”
They are completely right of course. Mathis concluded:
More blackouts are coming. Energy IS national security. Every dominant nation must also be dominant in energy, or it isn’t a dominant power.
And this is exactly where Biden is taking America.
----------------
Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) and a policy Advisor to The Heartland Institute. Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with ICSC and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute.
Illustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean.Illustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean. Throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the circulation carries warm waters (red arrows) northward near the surface and cold deep waters (blue arrows) southward. Image credit: NASA/JPL
PASADENA, Calif. - New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.
The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.
Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic—in Europe, North America and North Africa—would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from melting glaciers altered the ocean’s salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount of heat carried northward as a result.
Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation’s strength have been from ship-based surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis’ new technique is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world’s ocean.
With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal. Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date and the only one at high latitudes.
The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. “Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water,” Willis explained.
For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. “The changes we’re seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle,” said Willis. “The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling.”
If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. “No one is predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning,” said Willis. “Even if the overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models of today’s warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now.
“But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today’s climate,” Willis added. “Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic.”
With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. “Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems,” said Willis. “Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate.”
For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit NASA
JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
See GWPF’s coverage of the Science News story on “New findings from an international ocean observing network are calling into question the longstanding idea that global warming might slow down a big chunk of the ocean’s “conveyor belt.”
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