By Dr. Gordon Fulks

Letter to legislators in response to this story in OregonLive.
Dear Jim,

While it is easy to predict that our electric bills will rapidly double with the current push for large amounts of renewable energy to replace the tried and true power sources we presently use, the real issue is what are we getting for our money?

First of all, how can we be certain that the present course we are on will double our bills?  That’s easy.  “Renewable” sources have a wholesale cost per kilowatt-hour that is many times that of conventional sources like hydro, coal, natural gas, or nuclear.  If only a tiny fraction of our generating capability comes from these “renewable” sources, then the effects on the ratepayer will be the relatively minimal increases so far.  But as soon as legislators force power companies to expand from one or two percent to ten or twenty percent coming from extremely costly sources, watch out.  Electric bills have to increase greatly or the power companies will go broke.  Legislators can hide some of the pain by shifting a fraction of the burden to taxpayers, but the public will quickly figure out that taxpayers and ratepayers are the same individuals - us!  In other words, the crazy mandates for extremely expensive power will take a huge toll on our society and destroy our once substantial competitive advantage of cheap power here in the Northwest.

But let’s ask for a moment if we are getting something for all the money we are spending.  One of Bill Bradbury’s aids admitted to me that Global Warming might be a hoax, but argued that we are justified in continuing with it because of all the wonderful changes it is forcing in our society.  Presumably, windmills, solar cells, and ethanol were high on her list of wonderful accomplishments.  But all of these are energy and economic disasters for us.

Here’s why:

All energy takes some energy to produce.  Let me call this ‘overhead.’ It takes energy to drill an oil or natural gas well, additional energy to pump or truck what comes out of the ground to a refinery, still more energy to refine the crude into useful products and transport it to market.  But the whole process produces a vast amount of net energy, as well as a vast amount of high quality energy.  That means we get somewhere with such an undertaking, because our overhead is relatively low.

But as even Al Gore has discovered, we get nowhere with ethanol made from corn.  It requires about as much high quality energy to produce as we ever get out of the inferior product.  You might as well just burn the natural gas and diesel fuel directly and shutdown the elaborate process that is today converting these into ethanol.  That would also help our food prices that have risen dramatically as a consequence of the diversion of a significant fraction of our corn crop to fuel production.  That has had devastating consequences in the Third World that has long depended on our agricultural surpluses.  The UN World Food Program estimates that a billion people now go hungry thanks to our very misguided ethanol ‘experiment.’

Solar cells are a similar boondoggle, but without the horrendous social consequences.  It takes about as much electrical energy to maanufacture silicon solar cells as will ever be returned by them over their typical twenty year lifespan.  In some applications, the use of high quality energy (electricity) to make more high quality energy is justified, if the solar electricity is extremely valuable.  Satellite applications are a good example.  But if solar cells merely replace grid power, then they cannot be considered high quality power, because they do not produce electricity when the Sun is not shining.  That gets us into the issue of back up power which is necessary for all intermittent sources.  Hydro and natural gas generating plants work well for back up, if they have excess capacity.  But if new natural gas plants need to be built just to back up solar, then it is very difficult to justify the expense.  You would be considerably better off just building the natural gas plant and foregoing the solar.

Windmills are perhaps the worst boondoggle of all because they require much more high quality energy to manufacture, install, maintain, and backup than they will ever produce.  And in fact the electricity they produce is far inferior to that from a conventional power plant because it is so erratic.  With solar, we can at least depend on the Sun shining most days in appropriate locations.  The same cannot be said for wind.  The erratic nature of wind places a huge strain on the electric grid, if we expect our power to continue 24/7.  Continually bringing huge generators up to speed and then shutting them down just to accommodate the wind shortens their life considerably.  The same argument can be made for the large generators used in huge windmills.  Substantial environmental problems with windmills also suggest that they are a problem not a solution.

I would hope that our State Senators and Representatives would take the time to learn something about the generation of electricity, because they are forcing changes that even by their standards are a disaster.  I say “by their standards” because they are claiming carbon dioxide, energy independence, and environmental dividends that simply do not exist.

With high costs and no demonstrable benefits, we need to abandon this bandwagon in favor of real solutions for our energy needs.

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
Corbett, Oregon USA

By Paul Chesser

Clearly there is an organized effort by the Left to discredit Fox News’ “hard news” reporting credibility—most recently on global warming. Last week Media Matters and others criticized the network’s Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, for a memo he sent to his reporters that told them to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” In other words, telling them to objectively report the facts. The Leftosphere is in a tizzy.

Now comes a USA Today report about a survey conducted in November which found that “climate science doubts increase the more you watch Fox News:”

The survey results follow news this week from a leaked memo that a Fox News managing editor instructed reporters to note doubts about global temperature increases last year, and a University of Maryland study found that Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely” to believe falsehoods about the economy, political votes and climate science.

“The more Fox News you get, the less likely you are to trust scientists,” says Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick. The November survey of 890 people found that, “more exposure to Fox News was associated with less endorsement of the views of mainstream scientists about global warming, and all of these relationships are statistically significant.”

Yes, this was a perfectly objective survey conducted by an otherwise disinterested public opinion expert at Stanford. Who did the project for the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment, whose mission is “Creating Practical Solutions for People and the Planet.” And Krosnick is is a university fellow at Resources for the Future. Who just so happened to conduct this survey in November, before news broke about the Sammon memo, which implies they were sitting on it as they did their polling and waited until now so they could release a barrage of publicity—in conjunction with other Leftist groups—for maximum impact. And as you see above, Krosnick cited the Sammon memo in his survey report.

All of which USA Today found not relevant to report.

Update 2:00 p.m: I should have known better than to run this post without first checking if Marc Morano at Climate Depot had anything on Krosnick or Woods Institute. He does:

Professor Krosnick’s polling results are so woeful that both Pew Research Center Survey and Gallup polling recently took the time to harshly reprimand him for his shoddy work.

See: Warming propagandist Prof. Krosnick exposed: Pew research ‘says that Krosnick’s survey is marred by faulty methodology. ...used words that encourged a positive response’

Polling propaganda Prof. Krosnick slapped down by Gallup Polling! Recent polling ‘shows demonstrable drops in Americans’ acknowledgment of and concern about global warming’

Krosnick has been skewing polling results on global warming for years and has been getting caught every time.

And then there are the public opinion polls by Rasmussen that have shown increasing public skepticism on global warming—outnumbering alarmists.

Read more here.

Monday, 20 December 2010, 9:47 am Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

Call on NIWA to admit latest temperature review not valid

A call has been made on the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to admit that that there is no valid statistical justification for its claims of a 0.91 degree C rise in New Zealand’s average temperature last century. The call comes from Bryan Leyland, a spokesman for the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC), following the release this week by NIWA of its revised Seven Station Series (7SS), which the agency claimed has been vindicated in a peer review by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).

Enlarged here.

Mr Leyland has also called on the Minister of Science and Technology, Hon Dr Wayne Mapp to ask for the resignation of John Morgan as chairman of NIWA. “Mr Morgan has misled New Zealanders about the robustness of the latest 7SS review. In his media release this week, Mr Morgan wrote that NIWA had asked the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to conduct the peer review to ‘ensure a thorough examination by an independent, internationally respected, climate science organisation. Mr Morgan confirmed that the scientists from the Bureau’s National Climate Centre concluded that the results and underlying methodology used by NIWA were sound.’”

Mr Leyland said Mr Morgan’s interpretation was at odds with what the BoM had actually said in its peer review: “The review does not constitute a reanalysis of the New Zealand ‘seven station’ temperature record. Such a reanalysis would be required to independently determine the sensitivity of, for example, New Zealand temperature trends to the choice of the underlying network, or the analysis methodology. Such a task would require full access to the raw and modified temperature data and metadata, and would be a major scientific undertaking. As such, the review will constrain itself to comment on the appropriateness of the methods used to undertake the ‘seven station’ temperature analysis, in accordance with the level of the information supplied.”

Mr Leyland said that when in December 2009, NZCSC issued a formal request for the schedule of adjustments under the Official Information Act 1982, specifically seeking copies of “the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculations”. NIWA responded on 29 January 2010, that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature. We leave it to the public to judge whether NIWA’s admission that it had lost the original raw data was a convenient let-out or a failure to maintain proper records.

“Mr Morgan’s press release also claimed that BoM’s review ensured “the ideas, methods, and conclusions stood up in terms of scientific accuracy, logic, and consistency”. This bears no relation to the extremely limited comment actually made by BoM.”

Mr Leyland said Mr Morgan’s spin on what the BoM said in its peer review was another in a long line of misleading claims by NIWA in response to a request by the Climate Science Coalition in February this year that the original 7SS was faulty and should be removed from the NIWA website.

“Either Mr Morgan was misinformed by his own NIWA officials and is not sufficiently scientifically literate to know he was being so misinformed, or he has deliberately misquoted what BoM has said. Either way, he is not a fit and proper person to chair NIWA, and the Minister should demand his resignation,” said Mr Leyland.

“Another question the Minister needs to ask NIWA is why, in view of the BoM’s reference to analysis methodology, the 7SS reassessment was not peer reviewed by someone appropriately qualified in the science of statistical analysis, given that this latest 7SS, like its predecessor, now hurriedly removed from the NIWA website, is more of a statistical challenge of balancing a range of temperatures from seven widely separated weather stations across the country, and trying to arrive at an accurate and meaningful national average temperature, a figure that many climate and statistics scientists around the world say is not possible.

Mr Leyland suggests that NIWA’s claim of vindication is premature, given that the complete 7SS review process is still a work in progress. “In answer to a question in Parliament, the Minister, Dr Mapp, said: ‘NIWA’s review of the ‘seven-station’ series will be supervised by Principal Climate Scientist Dr Brett Mullan. It will be peer reviewed internally by NIWA Chief Climate Scientist Dr David Wratt and Principal Climate Scientist Dr James Renwick; and externally by two respected non-NIWA climate scientists, who have yet to be appointed. In addition, NIWA’s intent, during the 2010/11 financial year, is to submit the work described above as a paper to a scientific journal, where it would be subject to the normal independent peer review process. This work has been incorporated into NIWA’s science planning for 2010/11.  NIWA expects the work to include calculation of the temperature trend and attaching statistical confidence intervals for the resulting “seven-station series”.

“Until that justification has been independently peer-reviewed and published, as promised, the new temperature record should be termed ‘provisional’. Also, NIWA say that they are still working on the ‘statistical confidence intervals’. All the indications are that these margins of error will be large. Until these are calculated, the provisional temperature record carries no credibility as a scientific document.

“In view of the fact that alleged warming of our country was one of the factors used to justify saddling New Zealanders with extra costs of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), it is vital that any rising temperature claims by NIWA should be able to withstand a high level of rigorous scrutiny that the BoM says is not possible,” said Mr Leyland.

“We find it intriguing that NIWA now tells us that most of the claimed warming occurred in the first half of last century, whereas most of the increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions did not become apparent until the second half of last century, which bears out the assertions of climate skeptics that the minimal warming that ceased about 2002 was due to natural cyclical changes, not GHG emissions and, that, therefore, there is no justification for ETS. The likely continuation of the current cooling phase will make that increasingly evident during the next couple of years,” said Mr Leyland.

He added that NZCSC will conduct its own detailed analysis of the latest NIWA 7SS as early as possible in the New Year, and that it has been promised support from climate and statistics scientists at home and overseas whose qualifications are impeccable. “If NIWA can’t get it right, we will”, Mr Leyland concluded. See release here.