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.
Trump was 100% right (not just 97%) to show real leadership and walk away from Paris
I can guess why a raven is like a writing -desk, Alice said. “Do you mean you think you can find out the answer?” said the March Hare. “Exactly so,” said Alice. “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice replied. “At least I mean what I say. That’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say, ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!” “It IS the same thing with you,” said the Hatter.
Can you imagine stumbling upon the Mad Hatter’s tea party, watching as the discussions become increasingly absurd - and yet wanting a permanent seat at the table? Could Lewis Carroll have been having nightmares about the Paris climate treaty when he wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
President Trump was 100% correct (not just 97%) when he showed true leadership this week [ and walked America away from the madness laid out before him and us on the Paris climate table.
From suggestions that Earth’s climate was balmy and stable until the modern industrial era, to assertions that humans can prevent climate change and extreme weather events by controlling atmospheric carbon dioxide levels - to claims that withdrawing from Paris would “imperil our planet’s very survival” - the entire process has been driven by computer models and hysteria that have no basis in empirical science.
There is no convincing real-world evidence that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide has replaced the powerful natural forces that have driven Earth’s climate from time immemorial. Moreover, even if the United States totally eliminated its fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to climb. China and India are building new coal-fired power plants at a feverish clip. So is Germany. And China is financing or building dozens of additional coal-burning electricity generators in Africa, Asia and elsewhere.
Plus, even if alarmists are right about CO2, and every nation met its commitments under Paris, average planetary temperatures in 2100 would be just 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.3 F) lower than if we did nothing.
But “our closest allies” wanted Trump to abide by Obama’s commitment. Some did, because they want America to shackle its economy and drive energy prices into the stratosphere the same way they have. Others dearly want to follow a real leader, and walk away from the mad Paris tea party themselves.
But even poor countries signed the Paris treaty. Yes, they did - because they are under no obligation to reduce their coal, oil or natural gas use or their CO2 emissions. And because they were promised $100 billion a year in cash, plus free state-of-the-art energy technologies, from developed nations that would have become FMCs (formerly rich countries) as they slashed their energy use and de-industrialized.
But the Paris climate treaty was voluntary; the United States wouldn’t have to do all this. Right. Just like it’s voluntary for you to pay your taxes. China, India and poor developing countries don’t have to do anything. But the USA would have been obligated to slash its oil, gas and coal use and carbon dioxide emissions. It could impose tougher restrictions, but it could not weaken them. And make no mistake: our laws, Constitution, legal system, the Treaty on Treaties and endless lawsuits by environmentalist pressure groups before friendly judges would have ensured compliance and ever more punishing restrictions.
But hundreds of companies say we should have remained in Paris. Of course they do. Follow the money.
If we are to avoid a climate cataclysm, “leading experts” say, the world must impose a $4-trillion-per-year global carbon tax, and spend $6.5 trillion a year until 2030 to switch every nation on Earth from fossil fuels to renewable energy. That’s a lot of loot for bankers, bureaucrats and crony corporatists.
But, they assure us, this transition and spending would bring unimaginable job creation and prosperity. If you believe that, you’d feel right at home in Alice’s Wonderland and Looking Glass world.
Who do you suppose would pay those princely sums? Whose jobs would be secure, and whose would be expendable: sacrificed on the altar of climate alarmism? Here’s the Planet Earth reality.
Right now, fossil fuels provide 80% of all the energy consumed in the USA - reliably and affordably, from relatively small land areas. Wind and solar account for 2% of overall energy needs, expensively and intermittently, from facilities across millions of acres. Biofuels provide 3% - mostly from corn grown on nearly 40 million acres. About 3% comes from hydroelectric, 3% from wood and trash, 9% from nuclear.
Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and other states that generate electricity with our abundant coal and natural gas pay 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. California, Connecticut, New York and other states that impose wind, solar and anti-fossil fuel mandates pay 15 to 18 cents. Families in closely allied ultra-green Euro countries pay an average of 26 US cents per kWh, but 36 cents in Germany, 37 cents in Denmark.
EU manufacturers are already warning that these prices could send companies, factories, jobs and CO2 emissions to China and other non-Euro countries. EU electricity prices have skyrocketed 55% since 2005; 40% of UK households are cutting back on food and other essentials, to pay for electricity; a tenth of all EU families now live in green energy poverty. Elderly people are dying because they can’t afford heat!
The Paris treaty would have done the same to the United States, and worse.
The Heritage Foundation says Paris restrictions would cost average US families $30,000 in cumulative higher electricity prices over the next decade. How much of their rent, mortgage, medical, food, clothing, college and retirement budgets would they cut? Paris would eliminate 400,000 high-pay manufacturing, construction and other jobs - and shrink the US economy by $2.5 trillion by 2027. Other analysts put the costs of remaining in Paris much higher than this - again for no climate or environmental benefits.
Big hospitals like Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center’s Comprehensive Cancer Center in Winston-Salem, NC and Inova Fairfax Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Northern Virginia pay about $1.5 million per year at 9 cents/kWh - but $3 million annually at 18 cents… $5 million at 30 cents ... and nearly $7 million at 40 cents. How many jobs and medical services would those rate hikes wipe out?
Malls, factories and entire energy-intensive industries would be eliminated. Like families and small businesses, they would also face the new reality of having pricey electricity when it happens to be available, off and on all day, all week, when the wind blows or sun shines, instead of when it’s needed. Drilling and fracking, gasoline and diesel prices, trucking and travel, would also have been hard hit.
Americans are largely prohibited from mining iron, gold, copper, rare earth and other metals in the USA. Paris treaty energy prices and disruptions would have ensured that American workers could not turn metals from anywhere into anything - not even wind turbines, solar panels or ethanol distillation plants.
Most of the “bountiful” renewable energy utopia jobs would have been transporting, installing and maintaining wind turbines and solar panels made in China. Even growing corn and converting it to ethanol would have been made cost-prohibitive. But there would have been jobs for bureaucrats who write and enforce the anti-energy rules - and process millions of new unemployment and welfare checks.
Simply put, the Paris climate treaty was a terrible deal for the United States: all pain, no gain, no jobs, no future for the vast majority of Americans - with benefits flowing only to politicians, bureaucrats and crony capitalists. President Trump refused to ignore the realities of this economic suicide pact, this attempted global government control of lives, livelihoods and living standards of people everywhere.
That is why he formally declared that the United States is withdrawing from the treaty. He could now submit it for advice, consent - and rejection - by the Senate. He could also withdraw the United States from the underlying UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or negotiate that reflects empirical science and is fair to America and its families and workers. But what is really important now is this:
We are out of Paris! President Trump is leading the world back from the climate insanity precipice.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
Over the weekend, various ill-informed leftists marched around the world in support, ostensibly, of the Earth’s climate. As usual, ignorance was plentiful while knowledge of anything relevant to climate science was invisible.
If you want to learn something about climate science, as opposed to political propaganda, go here to read an important, just-released paper by Dr. James P. Wallace III, Dr. John R. Christy and Dr. Joseph S. D’Aleo, which has been endorsed by a number of other prominent climate scientists.
The paper is titled “On the Existence of a ‘Tropical Hot Spot’ & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding.” As you likely know, the EPA’s outrageous finding that emissions of carbon dioxide, which is necessary for essentially all life on earth, endanger public health or welfare was the basis for the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy.
Like any legitimate scientific paper, it is hard to summarize. I will try, but you really should read the whole thing.
The models on which global warming alarmism is based all critically hypothesize a “tropical hot spot” which is the alleged “signature” of human-caused warming. In fact, however, no such tropical hot spot exists:
Adjusting for just the Natural Factor impacts, NOT ONE of the Nine (9) Tropical temperature time series analyzed above was consistent with the EPA’s [Tropical Hot Spot] Hypothesis.
That is, adjusting for just the Natural Factor Impacts over their entire history; all nine of tropical temperature data analyzed above have non-statistically significant trend slopes - which invalidates the THS theory. Moreover, CO2 did not even come close to having a statistically significant impact on a single one of these temperature data sets. From an econometric structural analysis standpoint, the generic model worked extremely well in all 9 cases.
These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s claim of a Tropical Hot Spot, caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world. Also critically important, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 14 temperature time series that were analyzed.
Thus, the analysis results invalidate each of the Three Lines of Evidence in its CO2 Endangerment Finding. Once EPA’s THS assumption is invalidated, it is obvious why the climate models they claim can be relied upon, are also invalid.
It is remarkable that anyone would argue for the superiority of a half-baked theory, as described in a model, over empirical observation. Certainly no competent scientist would do so. Yet that is what is happening in the global warming debate. As we have documented many times, leftists, knowing they are losing the argument, have resorted to altering surface temperature records, over which they have jurisdiction, to conform to their theory. This is, in my opinion, the worst scandal in the history of science.
If the principal natural factors - solar, volcanic and ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) activity are taken out of the equation, there has been no net global warming in recent years:
The conclusion, based on empirical evidence:
The above analysis of Global Balloon & Satellite atmospheric temperature as well as Contiguous U.S. and Hadley Global Average Surface Temperature data turned up no statistical support for suggesting that CO2, even taken together with all other omitted variables, is the cause of the positive trend in the reported U.S. and Global temperature data.
In fact, it seems very clear that the Global Warming that has occurred over the period 1959 to date can be quite easily explained by Natural Factor impacts alone. Given the number of independent entities and differing instrumentation used in gathering the temperature data analyzed herein, it seems highly unlikely that these findings are in error.
I have tried to excerpt understandable paragraphs, but there is plenty of raw science in the article, e.g. (footnotes omitted):
One final question remains that has not yet been explicitly dealt with herein. It is, can the existence of the CO2 equation really be confirmed so that simultaneous equation parameter estimation techniques must be utilized to confirm CO2’s statistically significant impact on temperature? In the Preface, the authors referred to a specific paper for a proof. Below very significant additional proof is provided.
With CO2 determined to be not statistically significant in the structural analysis of the 13 temperature data sets as summarized in Section XXIII immediately above, the equation system described in the Preface can be seen to be recursive which permits parameter estimation of the CO2 equation in the system by ordinary or direct least squares.
An explicit form of the CO2 equation referred to in the Preface is:
[1] (DeltaC - cfossil)t = a + b*Tt + c* CO2,t-1
Where
(DeltaC - cfossil)t, is the efflux of Net non-fossil fuel CO2 emissions from the oceans and land into the atmosphere and cfossil is CO2 emissions from Fossil Fuel consumption.
Tt is UAH Tropical TLT Ocean temperature. The expected sign is positive.
CO2,t-1 on the right-hand side is a proxy for Land use. The expected sign is negative, because as CO2 levels rise, other things equal, the CO2 absorption of the flora increase.
As shown in Table XXIV-1, applying ordinary least squares to this equation yields a high Adjusted R square (0.64.) The coefficients have the correct signs and are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level.
The science is fascinating, but you don’t have to be a scientist to understand why global warming hysteria is wrong. Here are the indisputable, basic facts:
* The earth’s climate has been changing for millions of years. We are currently living in a geologic era characterized by ice ages. I like to point out that 15,000 years ago - the blink of an eye - the place where I live was buried under ice somewhere between a half mile and a mile thick. Scientists have theories, but nothing approaching knowledge about why wild swings in the earth’s climate have occurred over the last million years. One thing we know for sure is that it had nothing to do with mankind’s emission of carbon dioxide.
* We are living in a relatively cool era. Since the end of the last Ice Age, the earth has been warmer than it is now most of the time - most experts say, about 90% of the time. So if temperatures rise a little, it is hardly a surprise.
* A reasonable (although debatable) scientific argument based on energy transfer can be made that a doubling of CO2 would raise the earth’s average temperature by 1 degree centigrade. Everyone agrees this would be a good thing.
* To generate scary headlines, alarmists speculate that various positive feedbacks would increase that possible 1 degree temperature gain to somewhere between 3 and 6 degrees. These feedback theories are speculative at best. Really, we know they are false, since higher temperatures over the past 500,000 years have not caused any sort of runaway temperature increase.
* Global warming alarmism is based solely on models, not on observation. But we know the models are wrong. They predict far greater warming than has been observed over recent decades. A model that has been proved wrong is worthless. It can’t be resuscitated by after-the-fact selective, politically-motivated tweaking.
That, really, is all you need to know.
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See how CO2, our vegetation’s best fertilizer changes with the season.
By Michael Bastasch Daily Caller in Truthfeed News
"97% Consensus on Climate Change” COMPLETELY DEBUNKED as a LIE
By now you’ve probably hear liberals complain about Trump’s cutting the EPA and not caring enough about “Climate Change.”
Some may throw out a popular fake talking point that there is a 97 percent scientific consensus that man made climate change is a fact.
There’s only one problem, that 97% statistic is a complete lie.
Journalist Michael Bastasch does a fantastic job of debunking the fallacy.
From DailyCaller:
We’ve heard it time and time again: “97 percent of scientists agree global warming is real and man-made.”
Question one aspect of the global warming “consensus” and politicians and activists immediately whip out the figure. “You disagree with 97 percent of scientists?”
The 97 percent figure was often used by the Obama administration to bolster its case for phasing out fossil fuels, and President Barack Obama himself used the figure to undercut his critics. NASA even cites studies purporting to show near-unanimous agreement on the issue.
More recently, Newsweek included this figure in an article fretting about “climate deniers” in state legislatures trying to influence science curriculum. The author couldn’t resist noting that “97% of scientists who actively study Earth’s climate say it is changing because of human activity.”
Liberals use the figure to shut down debate around global warming. Afterall, how can you disagree with all those scientists, many of whom have spent their lives studying the climate?
But how many proponents of “climate action” have actually bothered to read the research that underlays such a popular talking point? How many realize the “consensus” the research claims to find is more of a statistical contortion than actual agreement?
Probably not many, so let’s talk about the 2013 study led by Australian researcher John Cook claiming there’s a 97 percent consensus on global warming.
What Does The ‘Consensus’ Really Mean?
Cook and his colleagues set out to show just how much scientists agreed that humans contribute to global warming.
To do this, Cook analyzed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers on global warming published between 1991 and 2011 to see what position they took on human influence on the climate.
Of those papers, just over 66 percent, or 7,930, took no position on man-made global warming. Only 32.6 percent, or 3,896, of peer-reviewed papers, endorsed the “consensus” that humans contribute to global warming, while just 1 percent of papers either rejected that position or were uncertain about it.
Cook goes on to claim that of those papers taking a position on global warming (either explicitly or implicitly), 97.1 percent agreed that humans to some degree contribute to global warming.
In terms of peer-reviewed papers, the “97 percent consensus” is really the “32.6 percent consensus” if all the studies reviewed are taken into account.
But Cook also invited the authors of these papers to rate their endorsement of the “consensus.” Cook emailed 8,574 authors to self-rate their papers, of which only 1,189 authors ended up reviewing their work.
Again, 35.5 percent, or 761, of those self-rated papers took no position on the cause of global warming. Some 62.7 percent, or 1,342, of those papers endorsed the global warming “consensus,” while 1.8 percent, or 39, self-rated papers rejected it.
Twisting the numbers a bit, Cook concludes that 97.2 percent of the self-rated papers with a position on global warming endorsed the idea humans were contributing to it.
Other studies written before and after Cook’s attempted to find a consensus, but to varying degrees, finding a range of a 7 to 100 percent (yes, no disagreement) among climate experts, depending on what subgroup was surveyed.
Cook’s paper is probably the most widely cited, having been downloaded more than 600,000 times and cited in popular media outlets.
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See this earlier post on this phony claim here. See one here on Watts Up With That showing a peer review paper why Cook’s paper was totally wrong.
The great Michael Crichton MD and author wrote”
“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc)
There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
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