ENERGY POVERTY UPDATE : Wind & Solar Obsession Causing Skyrocketing Power Prices & Frozen Grannies

“ELDERLY people are dying in their cold homes or being rushed to hospital because they can’t afford to put the heater on.
MORE than 130 people were admitted to NSW emergency departments last winter with cold-related problems including hypothermia, a 34 per cent increase from 10 years ago.
Over the same period power prices have increased by 117 per cent.”

ENOUGH said.

WAKE-UP politicians, addicted to UNreliables to feather their ‘green’ credentials. Enough is enough. @sussanley

STOP THESE THINGS

Australia’s wind and solar obsession has driven power prices through the roof and the poor and elderly to early graves. Staying warm in the depth of winter is no longer just a matter of turning up the dial on the AC, for the poorest and most vulnerable it’s a daily battle for survival.

In the space of a decade, power prices have doubled and so too the number of households disconnected from the grid; because they can no longer afford to pay their bills.

A generation ago, Australians enjoyed the world’s cheapest power prices; thanks to its suicidal renewable energy policies, they now suffer among the highest.

That all of this was perfectly predictable, and perfectly avoidable, makes it all the more outrageous. Here’s Peta Credlin expressing just that.

‘What a joke’ that Australians are ‘too frightened to turn on appliances’
Sky news
Peta Credlin, Luke Grant and Jeremy Cordeaux

View original post 1,282 more words


WARREN BUFFETT Rejects All-Renewable Future With $10 Billion Bet on Oil & Gas

STOP THESE THINGS

Australian voters just shredded the notion that the proletariat is wedded to heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Labor’s Bill Shorten sought to ram a 50% Renewable Energy Target down voter’s throats; a concept which the vast majority of them duly rejected.

Sure, there were plenty of other issues that sank the Green/Labor Alliance. However, it should be remembered that 2019 was billed as the ‘Climate Change Election’, with wind and solar pitched up as the only panacea to what has now become a ‘climate emergency’.

Pundits professed, with great certitude, the notion that the Australian public just can’t get enough intermittent, unreliable and unaffordable electricity. Well, that didn’t quite pan out. Bill Shorten slunk off the political stage, a wounded and embittered hero of renewable energy zealots and rent seekers, alike.

Another part of the meme was that the markets had already turned their back on fossil…

View original post 1,112 more words


INCONVENIENT : ‘The World Is Literally A Greener Place Than It Was Twenty Years Ago’ – NASA

China and India Lead the Way in Greening | NASA - CIMATISM

China and India Lead the Way in Greening | NASA (Climatism edit)


“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.” – Bertrand Russel

***

DON’T expect to see this ‘good’ environmental news on the mainstream media anytime soon.

WHEN you’re in the business of demonising carbon dioxide and frightening the Thunberg’s kiddies for political and ideological ends, such good news comes as a rather unwelcome message!

Via NASA Earth Observatory :

China and India Lead the Way in Greening

The world is literally a greener place than it was twenty years ago, and data from NASA satellites has revealed a counterintuitive source for much of this new foliage. A new study shows that China and India—the world’s most populous countries—are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect comes mostly from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries.

Ranga Myneni of Boston University and colleagues first detected the greening phenomenon in satellite data from the mid-1990s, but they did not know whether human activity was a chief cause. They then set out to track the total amount of Earth’s land area covered by vegetation and how it changed over time.

The research team found that global green leaf area has increased by 5 percent since the early 2000s, an area equivalent to all of the Amazon rainforests. At least 25 percent of that gain came in China. Overall, one-third of Earth’s vegetated lands are greening, while 5 percent are growing browner. The study was published on February 11, 2019, in the journal Nature Sustainability.

The maps on this page show the increase or decrease in green vegetation—measured in average leaf area per year—in different regions of the world between 2000 and 2017. Note that the maps are not measuring the overall greenness, which explains why the Amazon and eastern North America do not stand out, among other forested areas.

“China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9 percent of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation,” said lead author Chi Chen of Boston University. “That is a surprising finding, considering the general notion of land degradation in populous countries from overexploitation.”

globalgreening_tamo_2017

globalgreening_tamo_2017

This study was made possible thanks to a two-decade-long data record from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. An advantage of MODIS is the intensive coverage they provide in space and time: the sensors have captured up to four shots of nearly every place on Earth, every day, for the past 20 years.

“This long-term data lets us dig deeper,” said Rama Nemani, a research scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center and a co-author of the study. “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now with the MODIS data, we see that humans are also contributing.”

China’s outsized contribution to the global greening trend comes in large part from its programs to conserve and expand forests (about 42 percent of the greening contribution). These programs were developed in an effort to reduce the effects of soil erosion, air pollution, and climate change.

Another 32 percent of the greening change in China, and 82 percent in India, comes from intensive cultivation of food crops. The land area used to grow crops in China and India has not changed much since the early 2000s. Yet both countries have greatly increased both their annual total green leaf area and their food production in order to feed their large populations. The agricultural greening was achieved through multiple cropping practices, whereby a field is replanted to produce another harvest several times a year. Production of grains, vegetables, fruits and more have increased by 35 to 40 percent since 2000.

countrieschart_tamo_2017

countrieschart_tamo_2017

How the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors. For example, increased food production in India is facilitated by groundwater irrigation. If the groundwater is depleted, this trend may change. The researchers also pointed out that the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions such as Brazil and Indonesia. There are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape.

Nemani sees a positive message in the new findings. “Once people realize there is a problem, they tend to fix it,” he said. “In the 1970s and 80s in India and China, the situation around vegetation loss was not good. In the 1990s, people realized it, and today things have improved. Humans are incredibly resilient. That’s what we see in the satellite data.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of Chen et al.,(2019). Story by Abby Tabor, NASA Ames Research Center, with Mike Carlowicz, Earth Observatory.

*

GLOBAL GREENING…

“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.” – NASA

NASA previously reported on the ‘greening of the earth’ thanks to the CO2 ‘fertilisation’ effect.

HOWEVER, such good news was again carefully omitted by the mainstream media and environmental activists keen to preserve their ‘catastrophic’ global warming climate change narrative and continue their demonisation of life-giving gas carbon dioxide, deceptively referring to it as “carbon pollution” :

NASA ON (inconvenient) GLOBAL GREENING

“A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25.” – NASA

CO2 is making Earth greener—for now – Climate Change- Vital Signs of the Planet.png

CO2 is making Earth greener—for now – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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BIAS BY OMISSION – THE WORST FORM OF PROPAGANDA

CSIRO Censoring Their Own Climate Research

IN 2013, the CSIRO commissioned a study that found “Deserts ‘greening’ from rising carbon dioxide: Green foliage boosted across the world’s arid regions.”

THE ‘greening’ of deserts, thanks to rising CO2, happens to be a very unwelcome message for the environmental movement and apparently for the CSIRO, too! So, they simply removed the study from their website!

http-::www.csiro.au:404.aspx?item=%2fportals%2fmedia%2fdeserts-greening-from-rising-co2&user=extranet%5cAnonymous&site=Phoenix.png

http://www.csiro.au/404.aspx?item=%2fportals%2fmedia%2fdeserts-greening-from-rising-co2&user=extranet%5cAnonymous&site=Phoenix

CSIRO’s peer-reviewed study can be found at Science Daily :

Deserts ‘greening’ from rising carbon dioxide- Green foliage boosted across the world’s arid regions — ScienceDaily

Deserts ‘greening’ from rising carbon dioxide: Green foliage boosted across the world’s arid regions — ScienceDaily

H/t @FrankWi74044551

•••

MORE on Global Greening :

STATE Of The Climate Report :

IPCC Extreme Weather Report 2018 SR15 :

EXTREME WEATHER Related :

TEMPERATURE Related :

ORIGINS Of The Global Warming Scam :

•••

THE Climatism Tip Jar – Pls Help Keep The Good Fight Alive!

(Climate sceptics/rationalists still waitin’ for that “big oil” cheque to arrive in the mail!)

Help us to hit back against the bombardment of climate lies costing our communities, economies and livelihoods far, far too much.

Thanks to all those who have donated. Your support and faith in Climatism is highly motivating and greatly appreciated!

Citizen journalists can’t rely on mastheads, rather private donations and honest content. Every pledge helps!

Click link for more info…

Thank You! Jamie.

Donate with PayPal

•••


COGNITIVE BIAS : Climate Change Alarmists Refuse To Accept ‘The Science’ That Proves Extreme Weather Events Are NOT Increasing

Screen Shot 2019-11-23 at 8.50.23 am


“WHEN the heart rules the head,
passion takes over reason.”

– Ortega y Gasset

“IT would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”
Joseph Goebbels

***

THE widely held belief that ‘Extreme Weather’ has become worse, as a result of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, is a tribute to the success of climate change propaganda pushed relentlessly by CO2-centric politicians and compliant mainstream media.

PROMOTING Extreme Weather is specifically designed to shift public opinion about the purported seriousness of human-induced global warming climate change, through the use of emotional imagery and dire prognostications in order for draconian and costly climate policy to be accepted and implemented with as little resistance as possible from the taxpaying public.

COGNITIVE BIAS fuelled by an era of mass hysteria, delusion, groupthink and panic has helped foster dark and far-fetched clichés of a current “climate crisis”, that is an “existential threat” which will “end civilisation by 2030”.

*

THANKS to the dramatic rise in personal weather recording devices – smart phones and CCTV – the sampling rate (what you see or hear directly) of Extreme Weather events, broadcast via social and mainstream media, has risen dramatically in recent years.

BUT, have actual Extreme Weather events increased in frequency or intensity? In particular, over long-term ‘climate’ scales?

THE short answer is a big fat NO! Extreme Weather events have not increased in frequency or intensity as carbon dioxide emissions have increased. In many cases the exact opposite is occurring.

THIS ‘inconvenient’ fact has been proven by empirical data and confirmed by the last two (warmist) U.N. IPCC reports on Extreme Weather: SREX (AR5) 2013 report and the latest SR15 report released August, 2018:

***

EXTREME WEATHER METRICS


DROUGHT

UN IPCC : “Low confidence in the sign of drought trends since 1950 at global scale…likely to be trends in some regions of the world, including increases in drought in the Mediterranean and W Africa & decreases in droughts in central N America & NW Australia” – UN IPCC SR15 (2018)

GLOBAL TREND

little-change-in-global-drought-over-the-past-60-years-nature

Little change in global drought over the past 60 years | Nature

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NO historical trend in U.S. drought as CO₂ rises :

climate-change-indicators-drought-climate-change-indicators-in-the-united-states-us-epa

Climate Change Indicators – Drought | Climate Change Indicators in the United States | US EPA

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1934 : WHEN CO₂ WAS AT ‘SAFE’ LEVELS

IN 1934, when CO₂ was at ‘safe’ levels, severe to extreme drought covered around 80% of the entire U.S. Such conditions endured for most of the decade known as the “Dust Bowl” era :

psi-193408.gif

Historical Palmer Drought Indices | Temperature, Precipitation, and Drought | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

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400 PPM ‘DANGEROUS’ CO₂

CURRENT U.S. drought conditions with CO₂ at ‘dangerous’ levels (400PPM) :

Screen Shot 2019-03-18 at 7.39.31 am.png

U.S. Drought Monitor

*

CALIFORNIA’s “PERMANENT DROUGHT” UPDATE

THANKS to superstitious climate kiddies wagging school, in just 3 years, California went from 97% in drought to just 1% :

D1I9OEbX4AEnUEs

Tom Bevan on Twitter: “Pretty remarkable: In 3 years, California went from 97% in drought to just 1%.… “

*

WHEN CO₂ was at ‘safe’ levels, droughts in California lasted for 200 years :

the-difference-between-weather-and-climate-the-deplorable-climate-science-blog

The Difference Between Weather And Climate | The Deplorable Climate Science Blog

***

FLOODS

“There is low confidence due to limited evidence, however, that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and the magnitude of floods.” – UN IPCC SR15 (2018)

***

HEATWAVES

ACCORDING to the EPA, the low-CO2 1930s had (by far) the worst heatwaves in US history :

us-epa-1930s-heatwaves

US Annual Heat Wave Index | EPA

*

WHEN CO₂ was at ‘safe levels’, Adelaide’s temperature climbed above 100°F, six days in a row.

ADELAIDE – March, 1940 :

  1. Friday  –  24°C (74.4F)
  2. Saturday  –  24°C (75.7F)
  3. Sunday  –  28°C (81.7F)
  4. Monday  –  34°C (93.5F)
  5. Tuesday  –  31°C (88.4F)
  6. Wednesday  –  35°C (94.9F)
  7. Thursday  –  40°C (103.9F)
  8. Friday  –  42°C (107.7F)
  9. Saturday  –  43°C (110.1F)
  10. Sunday  –  42°C (108.3F)
  11. Monday  –  42°C (107.9F)
  12. Tuesday  –  40°C (103.6F)

 

RECORD MARCH HEAT WAVE : Six Consecutive Days Above 100°F | Climatism

***

GLOBAL TROPICAL CYCLONES

“Numerous studies towards and beyond AR5 have reported a decreasing trend
in the global number of tropical cyclones and/or the globally accumulated cyclonic energy”UN IPCC SR15 (2018)

“There is only low confidence regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers under global warming over the last four decades.”UN IPCC SR15 (2018)

frequency_12months.png

Global Tropical Cyclone Activity | Ryan Maue

*

AUSTRALIAN TROPICAL CYCLONES

AUSTRALIAN tropical cyclones are declining in both intensity and frequency as CO₂ rises :

***

HURRICANES

GLOBAL Hurricanes are declining in both frequency and intensity as CO₂ increases :

frequency_12months-1.png

Global Major Hurricane Frequency | Ryan Maue

*

5646920290892b83489adf085f4822f79dc0957b924dfd90471da36186e4d282.png

Joe Bastardi: Climate Crisis? Four Major Metrics That Say Otherwise — The Patriot Post

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CAT 3+ U.S. Landfalling Hurricanes (per decade) declining rapidly as CO₂ emissions rise :

*

FLORIDA Major Hurricane Strikes – Still No Trend :

florida-major-hurricanes-4-1-550x413

Florida Major Hurricane Strikes: Still No Trend « Roy Spencer, PhD

***

TORNADOES

2018 was one of the least active US tornado years on record, despite record and rising CO₂ emissions.

AS of October, a new record low tornado count was set. The cumulative total for 2018 is 759; the previous lowest number of tornadoes for this date was 761. The SPC has records extending back 65 years.

This lack of tornadic storms in recent years should also correlate with lesser severe thunderstorm activity in general in the U.S., since the conditions which produce large hail and damaging winds are generally the same as are required for tornadoes (strong instability, plentiful moisture, and wind shear). – Roy Spencer PhD

NB// The US represents about 75 percent of the world’s recorded tornadoes.

new-record-low-tornado-count-as-of-october-3-«-roy-spencer-phd.png

New Record Low Tornado Count as of October 3 « Roy Spencer, PhD

*

572feb3143e442335e078263b80ee1f1b1d049d2170df7cf86a7f34be7ee1538.png

Joe Bastardi: Climate Crisis? Four Major Metrics That Say Otherwise — The Patriot Post

*

THE frequency of strong to violent tornadoes is also decreasing :

1464ce8b899bbc96ead70629388c704c15f9a7b9ed5a43b970f6e40014002e70

Joe Bastardi: Climate Crisis? Four Major Metrics That Say Otherwise — The Patriot Post

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6bac56b3dffce250bcef48721636d0436e654edb976d9dc2b8767b57b79a9b94

Joe Bastardi: Climate Crisis? Four Major Metrics That Say Otherwise — The Patriot Post

*

THE trend is clearly down across the board. Yet why are no mainstream journalists curious about this?

NB// IPCC SR15 “Extreme Weather” report made no mention of Tornadoes. Nor, the mainstream media!

***

GLOBAL WEATHER DISASTERS / LOSSES

GLOBAL weather disasters/losses as a percentage of global GDP are declining as CO₂  emissions rise.

THROUGH 7 months of 2018 weather disasters as % GDP were on record (low) pace…

weather-disasters-as-gdp-–-roger-pielke-jr-twitter

Weather disasters as % GDP – Roger Pielke Jr (Twitter)

NB// LOSS data does not include the two big CAT4’s that struck the US in 2018 – Florence (Sep) and Michael (Oct).

***

CONCLUSION

BIAS BY OMISSION

IN my opinion, the worst form of propaganda is ‘bias by omission’ – information and facts that you are ‘not’ told about, in order to keep the truth from you.

THE mainstream media has not and will not report the facts on “Extreme Weather”, as clearly laid out in the science and data above, because such facts are obviously extremely ‘inconvenient’ to their “catastrophic” man-made global warming narrative.

*

VITAL information central to the potential seriousness of climate change – Extreme Weather – has been purposely omitted by the mainstream media and replaced by emotions, alarmism and exaggerations in order to fit the climate-calamity narrative designed to scare you into belief and obedience.

THIS is why the global warming climate change debate has become so dangerously deceptive and dishonest. Climate truths hidden from you and replaced with a narrative far more acceptable – Hollywood-style climate hysteria based on alarmism, increased sampling rates and overheated, CO2-centric climate models that do not accord with observed reality.

•••

UPDATE

DID not see either of these instructive graphs painted on a placards at any of the kiddie climate rallies last Friday. Guess they don’t fit their ‘catastrophic’ climate narrative…

Climate related deaths Vs non related

Global Deaths from Climate and non-Climate Catastrophes, 1920-2018

CO2 emissoins Vs Poverty

Carbon Emissions and World Prosperity

*

PERHAPS the climate kids would have been wise to read and learn the words of H.L. Mencken, before being forced out by their parents and teachers to act as standard bearers of new radical eco-socialism, protected by ‘innocence’ and lack of age :

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.” – H.L. Mencken

•••

Read the rest of this entry »


AUSTRALIA’s Hottest Summer? Maybe Not.

“FAR from this year being the record, the hottest summer was actually back in 1900. This summer only ranks 5th, behind 2017, 1902 and 2006.

THE summers of 1884 and 1901 are also close behind.

IN fact, the spate of hot summers recently look little different to those of the early 1900s.”

74E1DDC3-5B94-49FD-8EFC-C9EAD7A8609E

Walgett 1880 to 2019

EXCELLENT investigative work, again, by Mr. Paul Homewood.

THE precise job that the mainstream media should and must be doing in order to keep a check on government and its institutions.

BUT, just as our top ‘scientific’ organisations have been captured by environmental elites, so too have the majority-Leftist mainstream media.

AND, for the mainstream media – keeping “truth to power” in the area of the ‘environment’ would mean sanitising their man-made global warming narrative that they’ve invested so much political capital, ideology and personal ego into for decades. Not gonna happen!

ERGO, tough times indeed for “truth to power” to exist in the fashionable age of climate change virtue-signalling, driven by politics, propaganda, bureaucratic pseudoscience and trillions of dollars of taxpayers hard-earned.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

This made news a couple of weeks ago, but I have been waiting for full details from the BOM:

image

Australia has experienced its hottest summer on record, according to the nation’s Bureau of Meteorology.

Hundreds of individual heat records were shattered across the country over the past three months.

The warm weather, 2.14C above the long-term average, caused bushfires, blackouts and a rise in hospital admissions.

Wildlife also suffered, with reports of mass deaths of wild horses, native bats and fish.

“The real standout was just how widespread and prolonged each heatwave was – almost everywhere was affected,” climatologist Blair Trewin told the BBC.

Temperatures had exceeded the previous hottest summer in 2012-13 by nearly 1C, he added – “a very large margin for a national record”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-47410366

Naturally the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has blamed it on climate change. But is it quite as simple as…

View original post 460 more words


WHY “Green” Energy Is Futile, In One Lesson

Greening The Land (high res) - Cartoons By Josh

Greening The Land | Cartoons By Josh


“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

***

H/t @FriendsOScience

A MUST READ for all policy makers if they have any respect for the families, workers and the most vulnerable in their communities whose lives are being broken as a consequence of the mad rush into feel-good UNreliables – wind and solar ‘power’…


WHY “GREEN” ENERGY IS FUTILE, IN ONE LESSON

POSTED ON BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN ENERGY POLICY, ENVIRONMENT

Here in Minnesota, we are enduring a brutal stretch of weather. The temperature hasn’t gotten above zero in the last three days, with lows approaching -30. And that is in the Twin Cities, in the southern part of the state. Yesterday central Minnesota experienced a natural gas “brownout,” as Xcel Energy advised customers to turn thermostats down to 60 degrees and avoid using hot water. Xcel put up some customers in hotels. Why?

Because the wind wasn’t blowing. Utilities pair natural gas plants with wind farms, in order to burn gas, which can be ramped up and down more quickly than coal, when the wind isn’t blowing.

Which raises the question: since natural gas is reliable, why do we need the wind farms? The answer is, we don’t. When the wind isn’t blowing–as it wasn’t yesterday–natural gas supplies the electricity. It also heats homes, and with bitter cold temperatures and no wind, there wasn’t enough natural gas to go around. The resulting “brownout” has been a political shock in Minnesota.

Isaac Orr, a leading energy expert who is my colleague at Center of the American Experiment, explains this phenomenon in detail:

[W]ind is producing only four percent of electricity in the MISO region, of which Minnesota is a part.

While that’s not good, what’s worse is wind is only utilizing 24 percent of its installed capacity, and who knows how this will fluctuate throughout the course of the day.

Coal, on the other hand, is churning out 45 percent of our power, nuclear is providing 13 percent, and natural gas is providing 26 percent of our electricity.

This is exactly why the renewable energy lobby’s dream of shutting down coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants and “replacing” them with wind and solar is a fairy tale. It simply cannot happen, because we never know if and when the wind will blow or the sun will shine when we need it most.

“But the wind is always blowing somewhere” ~ a renewable energy lobbyist

Renewable energy apologists often argue that although the wind may not be blowing in your neighborhood, it’s blowing, somewhere. All we have to do, they argue, is build wind turbines and transmission lines all over the country so we can have renewable energy everywhere. It turns out this old chestnut is also completely wrong.

For example, the wind isn’t blowing in North Dakota or South Dakota, where more than 1,800 MW (a massive amount) of wind projects are operating or planned, at massive cost, by Minnesota electric companies.

In fact, the wind isn’t blowing anywhere.

Just look at California, the state that is consistently the most self-congratulating about how “green” they are. Wind is operating a 3 percent of installed capacity, solar is operating at 12 percent, natural gas is running wide open, and California is importing a whopping 27 percent of its electricity from Nevada and Arizona.
***
Days like today perfectly illustrate why intermittent, unreliable sources of energy like wind and solar would have no place in our energy system if they were not mandated by politicians, showered with federal subsidies, and lining the pockets of regulated utilities that are guaranteed to profit off wind and solar farms whether they are generating electricity, or not.

Isaac’s real-world message is starting to break through, at least here in Minnesota. Tomorrow morning the Star Tribune is running Isaac’s op-ed headlined “Bitter cold shows reliable energy sources are critical.”

Lawmakers considering doubling Minnesota’s renewable energy mandate to 50 percent by 2030 should use this week’s weather as a moment to reconsider their plans to lean so heavily on wind and solar.
***
[C]oal-fired power plants provided 45 percent of MISO’s power and nuclear provided 13 percent — most of this from Minnesota’s Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants (which we should keep open, by the way). Natural gas provided 26 percent of our electricity use at that time, and the remainder was imported from Canada and other U.S. states.

Natural gas also heated the homes of approximately 66 percent of Minnesotans this week, by far the most for any home heating fuel, but there wasn’t enough gas to combat the frigid temperatures.

Because of the extreme cold, Xcel Energy urged its natural gas customers in Becker, Big Lake, Chisago City, Lindstrom, Princeton and Isanti to reduce the settings on their thermostats, first down to 60 degrees, then to 63, through Thursday morning to conserve enough natural gas to prevent a widespread shortage as temperatures remained 14 below zero. Some Xcel customers in the Princeton area lost gas service, and Xcel reserved rooms for them in nearby hotels.

This week’s urgent notice from Xcel to conserve natural gas shows there is real danger in putting all of our eggs into the renewables-plus-natural gas basket. At a minimum, pursuing a grid powered entirely by solar, wind and natural gas would require more natural gas pipeline capacity, which is likely to be opposed by the factions that are currently challenging the replacement of the Line 3 pipeline.
***
If Minnesota lawmakers are sincere in their belief that we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions as soon as possible, they must lift Minnesota’s ban on new nuclear power plants, which has been in place since 1994.

Not only would nuclear power plants be essentially guaranteed to run in minus-24-degree weather, but a forthcoming study by American Experiment has found that new nuclear power plants could not only achieve a lower emissions rate by 2030, but also save Minnesota $30.2 billion through 2050.

Stay tuned. We will release that report in two weeks. I think it will be a bombshell, not only in Minnesota but in other states that are fecklessly mandating ever-higher utilization of intermittent, unreliable, inefficient “green” energy.

•••

UNreliables related :

Read the rest of this entry »


GREEN JOBS : Helicopter De-Icing For Wind Turbines

green jobs - helicopter de-icing - climatism

“Only two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity.” – Albert Einstein


WATCH…


“The collusion between wind energy and government disgusts me. If the Federal Production Tax Credit for wind energy didn’t exist, you would not see another industrial wind energy turbine built.” Warren Buffet

***

THE entire rationale for wind turbines is to stop global warming climate change by reducing the amount of CO2 being returned to the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels.

THE energy required for a helicopter to de-ice all the blades on a wind farm must outweigh any supposed saving in CO2 by a factor of 100 or more. Notwithstanding that no wind farm has saved a gram of CO2 due to construction and the necessary spinning reserve.

THE attached picture, taken from a wind farm in Sweden, is a metaphor for the complete insanity of the mad rush into useless UNreliables – wind and solar. Symbolic ‘energy’ gestures to the folly of ‘green’ madness that fail both physically and financially wherever installed.

THIS one photo alone sums up the collective era of eco-stupidity that we live in today, where rational thought, logic, reason and commonsense has been gleefully abandoned for enormous amounts of public money with valuable resources needlessly sacrificed.

AND, who pays? You pay!

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MORE ‘GREEN’ WINTER JOBS

snow on solar panels- tips for removal | solar power authority

Snow on Solar Panels: Tips for Removal | Solar Power Authority

snow-solar-panels-best-practices-civicsolar.jpg

Snow + Solar Panels: Best Practices | CivicSolar

 

UNRELIABLES related :

Read the rest of this entry »


NOTE TO POLICY MAKERS : 41 Reasons Why Wind ‘Power’ Can Not Replace Fossil Fuels

INDUTSRIAL WIND TURBINES - THE FLAWS

INDUSTRIAL Wind Turbines Are Neither “Clean, Green or Renewable” | CLIMATISM


“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

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WESTERN climate-theory-obsessed politicians continue their ruinous and costly obsession with wind and solar ‘energy’. ‘UNreliables‘ that repeatedly fail the environment, communities and economies wherever installed.

ENERGY poverty, blackouts, skyrocketing power bills, grid instability and the destruction of pristine landscapes, (flora and fauna) among the many deleterious effects of low energy-density, weather and fossil-fuel dependent windmills and solar panels.

ALICE Friedemann of ‘Energy Skeptic‘ meticulously lays out 41 reasons that expose the colossal flaws of the mad rush into wind ‘power’ as a genuine replacement for fossil fuels and/or nuclear power. Economy and job-destroying, anti-energy policy initiatives undertaken by all-too-many in our current ruling class that defy all logic, reason and common sense based on easily verifiable data and on-the-ground evidence.

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41 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels

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Source: Leonard, T. 2012. Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain’s ‘wind rush’? | Daily Mail

Preface. Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable.  Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fueled ships take the ore to a facility that will crush it and permeate it with toxic chemicals to extract the metal from the ore, the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter so intermittent electricity won’t do). There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fueled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.

Here are the topics covered below in this long post:

  1. Windmills require petroleum every single step of their life cycle. If they can’t replicate themselves using wind turbine generated electricity, they are not sustainable
  2. SCALE. Too many windmills needed to replace fossil fuels
  3. SCALE. Wind turbines can’t be scaled up fast enough to replace fossils
  4. Not enough rare earth metals and enormous amounts of cement, steel, and other materials required
  5. Not enough dispatchable power to balance wind intermittency and unreliability
  6. Wind blows seasonally, so for much of there year there wouldn’t be enough wind
  7. When too much wind is blowing for the grid to handle, it has to be curtailed and/or drives electricity prices to zero, driving natural gas, coal, and nuclear power plants out of business
  8. The best wind areas will never be developed
  9. The Grid Can’t Handle Wind Power without natural gas, which is finite
  10. The role of the grid is to keep the supply of power steady and predictable. Wind does the opposite, at some point of penetration it may become impossible to keep the grid from crashing.
  11. The grid blacks out when the supply of power varies too much. Eventually too much wind penetration will crash the grid.
  12. Windmills wouldn’t be built without huge subsidies and tax breaks
  13. Tremendous environmental damage from mining material for windmills
  14. Not enough time to scale wind up
  15. The best wind is too high or remote to capture
  16. Too many turbines could affect Earth’s climate negatively
  17. Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant global warming. A Harvard study raises questions about just how much wind should be part of a climate solution
    Less wind can be captured than thought (see Max Planck Society)
  18. Wind is only strong enough to justify windmills in a few regions
  19. The electric grid needs to be much larger than it is now
  20. Wind blows the strongest when customer demand is the weakest
  21. No utility scale energy storage in sight
  22. Wind Power surges harm industrial customers
  23. Energy returned on Energy Invested is negative
  24. Windmills take up too much space
  25. Wind Turbines break down too often
  26. Large-scale wind energy slows down winds and reduces turbine efficiencies
  27. Offshore Wind Farms likely to be destroyed by Hurricanes
  28. The costs of lightning damage are too high
  29. Wind doesn’t reduce CO2
  30. Turbines increase the cost of farming
  31. Offshore Windmills battered by waves, wind, ice, corrosion, a hazard to ships and ecosystems
  32. Wind turbines are far more expensive than they appear to be
  33. Wind turbines are already going out of business and fewer built in Europe
  34. TRANSPORTATION LIMITATIONS: Windmills are so huge they’ve reached the limits of land transportation by truck or rail
  35. Windmills may only last 12 to 15 years, or at best 20 years
  36. Not In My Back Yard – NIMBYism
  37. Lack of a skilled and technical workforce
  38. Wind only produces electricity, what we face is a liquid fuels crisis
  39. Wind has a low capacity Factor
  40. Dead bugs and salt reduce wind power generation by 20 to 30%
  41. Small windmills too expensive, too noisy, unreliable, and height restricted

Alice Friedemann :  www.energyskeptic.com  author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report ]

41 Reasons why wind power can not replace fossil fuels | Peak Energy & Resources, Climate Change, and the Preservation of Knowledge

CLICK here for detailed expansion of each of the 41 points…

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SEE also :

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ALARMISTS U-TURN : Scientists Confirm Great Barrier Reef Is Recovering From Bleaching, Again

GREAT BARRIER REEF RECOVERY - CLIMATISM

GREAT Barrier Reef Recovery – Climatism


WE need to get some broad based support,
to capture the public’s imagination…
So we have to offer up scary scenarios,
make simplified, dramatic statements
and make little mention of any doubts
Each of us has to decide what the right balance
is between being effective and being honest.

– Prof. Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
lead author of many IPCC reports

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H/t GWPF

REMEMBER when climate ‘scientists’ said “Corals on Great Barrier Reef will never be the same after back-to-back heat waves“

corals-on-great-barrier-reef-will-never-be-the-same-after-back-to-back-heat-waves-scientists-say
Corals on Great Barrier Reef will never be the same after back-to-back heat waves, scientists say | LA Times

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REMEMBER when climate ‘scientists’ said “Global warming has changed the Great Barrier Reef ‘forever’ …

Global warming has changed the Great Barrier Reef ‘forever,_ scientists say | The Washington Post

Global warming has changed the Great Barrier Reef ‘forever,’ scientists say | The Washington Post

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REMEMBER when climate ‘scientists’ said “Great Barrier Reef is damaged beyond repair and can no longer be saved

Great Barrier Reef is damaged beyond repair and can no longer be saved, say scientists

Great Barrier Reef is damaged beyond repair and can no longer be saved | The Telegraph

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Never-mind …

GREAT BARRIER REEF RECOVERS (Again)

'Glimmer Of Hope' For Great Barrier Reef As Study Shows Tolerance To Climate Change | HuffPost UK

‘Glimmer Of Hope’ For Great Barrier Reef As Study Shows Tolerance To Climate Change | HuffPost UK

The Great Barrier Reef fared better during an oceanic heat wave last year than during sizzling weather a year earlier that caused hundreds of miles of corals to bleach, according to a study published Monday that suggests the massive structure may be growing more tolerant to climate change.

The report in the journal Nature Climate Change analyzed how corals along the Great Barrier fared in back-to-back mass bleaching events. The reef ― a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the largest living structure on the planet ― was cooked by overheated seawater in 2016 and again in 2017, with images of sickly white coral horrifying people around the globe.

During the first event, which scientists likened to an underwater apocalypse, almost 30 percent of the reef died.

But the second event last year, which saw seas even hotter than 2016 in many places, didn’t harm the reef as badly as scientists expected. They speculated that the structure may be going through a forced evolution that has helped toughen it, at least in part.

“The good news is the Barrier Reef glass is still half-full,” said Terry Hughes, a lead author of the study and the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. “Whether we’ll still have reefs in 50 years time … there’s a glimmer of hope that we will.”

‘Glimmer Of Hope’ For Great Barrier Reef As Study Shows Tolerance To Climate Change | HuffPost UK

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AMAZING how quickly $444 MILLION of taxpayers hard-earned money can ‘fix’ the reef. Or, do vast amounts of free cash help dial down the hysteria from the Climate Crisis Industry and CO2-obsessed reef ‘scientists’?

Screen Shot 2018-12-11 at 8.13.06 am

Malcolm Turnbull defends surprise $444 million Government donation to tiny reef body – Politics | ABC News

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REEFS RECOVER (With or without $444 MILLION!)

DRAMATIC recovery of a remote reef off WA, after 1998 El Niño coral bleaching event:

1998 El nino Reef recovery WA

Recovery of an Isolated Coral Reef System Following Severe Disturbance | Science

From The Abstract :

Coral reef recovery from major disturbance is hypothesized to depend on the arrival of propagules from nearby undisturbed reefs. Therefore, reefs isolated by distance or current patterns are thought to be highly vulnerable to catastrophic disturbance. We found that on an isolated reef system in north Western Australia, coral cover increased from 9% to 44% within 12 years of a coral bleaching event, despite a 94% reduction in larval supply for 6 years after the bleaching. The initial increase in coral cover was the result of high rates of growth and survival of remnant colonies, followed by a rapid increase in juvenile recruitment as colonies matured. We show that isolated reefs can recover from major disturbance, and that the benefits of their isolation from chronic anthropogenic pressures can outweigh the costs of limited connectivity.

Recovery of an Isolated Coral Reef System Following Severe Disturbance

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CORAL BLEACHING IS A NATURAL PHENOMENON & REEFS HAVE SURVIVED & THRIVED IN FAR HIGHER TEMPS & CO2 LEVELS IN THE PAST

CORALS evolved during the Cambrian era when atmospheric CO2 levels were at 6,000-7,000 ppm, around 4,000 percent or 20 times higher than today’s “CO2-starved” environment of 400 ppm, with atmospheric and ocean temps temps far higher than today.

THE world was hotter during the Holocene optimum, yet somehow the Great Barrier Reef survived.

CORAL reefs have survived millions of years of dramatic and sudden climate change, yet climate alarmists want us to believe that a few hundred ppm more of essential trace gas CO2 “has changed the Great Barrier Reef ‘forever,’ (Wapo)” or that even a “Great Barrier Reef recovery [is] unlikely after ‘catastrophic die-off’“?!

BLEACHING is a naturally occurring phenomenon essential to the health and regrowth of coral reefs.

THE “Great Barrier Reef” is only “Great” because it has died off at least 7 known times over the millennia.

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DR TERRY HUGHES & THE POWER OF GRANT MONEY

Dr Terry Hughes

Dr Terry Hughes

Terry Hughes, is the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, the same University who recently censured physicist at James Cook University Professor Peter Ridd who has dared to question scientific findings that purport to show the Great Barrier Reef is in trouble.

IN June 2017, Ridd made the headlines after suspecting something was wrong with photographs being used to highlight the apparent rapid decline of the Great Barrier Reef.

AFTER attempting to blow the whistle on the bogus pictures, Ridd was censured by James Cook University and threatened with the sack

Screen Shot 2018-04-19 at 11.11.27 am

The ABC used a photo of reef bleaching on Flowerpot Rock in American Samoa in stories about the Great Barrier Reef.

ABC FAKE, FAKE NEWS…

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WHAT I See When I See a Wind Turbine

wind-and-oil-climatism

TO Get Wind Power You Need Oil


“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

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AN extremely inconvenient insight into the monumental amount of “dirty” fossil fuel derivatives required to manufacture, install and maintain so-called “green”, “clean” and “renewable” industrial wind turbines…

(Climatism images, links and bolds added)

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To Get Wind Power You Need Oil

Each wind turbine embodies a whole lot of petrochemicals and fossil-fuel energy

 

WIND turbines are the most visible symbols of the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels.

Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages [pdf] 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.

If wind-generated electricity were to supply 25 percent of global demand by 2030 (forecast [pdf] to reach about 30 petawatt-hours), then even with a high average capacity factor of 35 percent, the aggregate installed wind power of about 2.5 terawatts would require roughly 450 million metric tons of steel. And that’s without counting the metal for towers, wires, and transformers for the new high-voltage transmission links that would be needed to connect it all to the grid.

A lot of energy goes into making steel. Sintered or pelletized iron ore is smelted in blast furnaces, charged with coke made from coal, and receives infusions of powdered coal and natural gas. Pig iron is decarbonized in basic oxygen furnaces. Then steel goes through continuous casting processes (which turn molten steel directly into the rough shape of the final product). Steel used in turbine construction embodies typically about 35 gigajoules per metric ton.

To make the steel required for wind turbines that might operate by 2030, you’d need fossil fuels equivalent to more than 600 million metric tons of coal.

A 5-MW turbine has three roughly 60-meter-long airfoils, each weighing about 15 metric tons. They have light balsa or foam cores and outer laminations made mostly from glass-fiber-reinforced epoxy or polyester resins. The glass is made by melting silicon dioxide and other mineral oxides in furnaces fired by natural gas. The resins begin with ethylene derived from light hydrocarbons, most commonly the products of naphtha cracking, liquefied petroleum gas, or the ethane in natural gas.

Windkraft_Infografik_03_cs4_E_240310

Rotor blade structure

The final fiber-reinforced composite embodies on the order of 170 GJ/t. Therefore, to get 2.5 TW of installed wind power by 2030, we would need an aggregate rotor mass of about 23 million metric tons, incorporating the equivalent of about 90 million metric tons of crude oil. And when all is in place, the entire structure must be waterproofed with resins whose synthesis starts with ethylene. Another required oil product is lubricant, for the turbine gearboxes, which has to be changed periodically during the machine’s two-decade lifetime.

wind_turbine_gearbox_parts_washer

Wind Turbine Gearbox

Undoubtedly, a well-sited and well-built wind turbine would generate as much energy as it embodies in less than a year. However, all of it will be in the form of intermittent electricity—while its production, installation, and maintenance remain critically dependent on specific fossil energies. Moreover, for most of these energies—coke for iron-ore smelting, coal and petroleum coke to fuel cement kilns, naphtha and natural gas as feedstock and fuel for the synthesis of plastics and the making of fiberglass, diesel fuel for ships, trucks, and construction machinery, lubricants for gearboxes—we have no nonfossil substitutes that would be readily available on the requisite large commercial scales.

Wind Turbine Crude Oil 2

Wind Industry Crude Oil Mining

For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels.

This article appears in the March 2016 print issue as “What I See When I See a Wind Turbine.”

To Get Wind Power You Need Oil – IEEE Spectrum

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WIND ENERGY – not as “clean”, “green” or “renewable” as the bumper sticker suggests!

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SEE also :

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