Monthly Archives: November 2021

The Global Warming Policy Forum posted in October of this year an essay by Professor Gwythian Prins titled “Worm in the Rose.”  Prins’ premise is that “net zero” is unachievable and destructive. 

It is not often that I come across an essay than I like as well as the “Worm in the Rose. It is comprehensive and thus long.   You will have missed a knowledgeable and comprehensive survey of “net zero” and Prins’ recommendations if you do not read the entire essay. Below, is a copy and paste of his “Summary  of Main Points”.  Those points should peak your interest.

“Summary of main points

• ‘Green growth’ is vitiated by six key fallacies. The pursuit of a ‘green energy transition’ is the first: there has not been and is not now such a transition. ‘Modern renewables’ (wind/solar/ geothermal/tidal/biomass for heat and electricity) were 2% of world total primary energy in 2018, so wind and solar are even less than that. All renewables (old and modern) were 13% of world total primary energy in 1971 and 13.8% in 2018. These percentages are stuck, for good reasons, explained in this paper.

• The Free World is attempting to force a back-to-front energy transition, which has no historical precedent. All previous transitions have been from low-quality to high-quality, from high- to low-entropy, from disordered to ordered sources of energy.

• ‘Net Zero’ is a ‘Veblen good’ – consumed for purposes of conspicuous consumption – doing self-harm to the Free World’s international competitiveness, because energy is not an optional variable but integral to the health of any economy. Virtue signalling is not cost free.

• However, executive powers in market economies are resorting to market distortion, by legal fiat and by all manner of taxpayer-provided subsidy, to force forward their preferred environmentally and economically flawed so-called ‘green’ technologies, which try and fail to extract reliable power from thin flows of high-entropy fuels and which do not offer goods or services that people wish freely to adopt and buy.

• The key market signal when environmental impact and sustainability are at issue is EROEI (energy return on energy invested). However, it is little used because it is shockingly bad or even negative for renewables.

• Renewables often have worse full-cycle environmental costs worse than fossil fuels, which have, in the free market, delivered spontaneous decarbonisation of around 1.3% per year since 1800. ‘Market failure’ is a risky and arrogant concept. Stop meddling.

• There is a security imperative too. We are in a darkening geo-political environment: Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist command group – which is not to be equated with all Chinese people – has launched a ‘grey war’ against us. Supporting and facilitating the Free World’s distractions with ‘Net Zero’, and promoting the wish-lists of the International Energy Agency and United Nations, helps that group to undermine us.

• Evidence points to China having no belief in nor intention of adopting the decarbonisation agenda. They will supply us with the means to adopt dead-end technologies such as BEVs (battery electric vehicles), but will concentrate on more reliable ones at home. They are playing us for fools.

 • China is eagerly acquiring our key strategic technologies including, critically, geostrategically important motive power technologies, such as advanced diesels and jet engines. Thereby it seeks to supplant the West’s dominance of the world order. ‘Net Zero’ is self-destructive of that dominance.

• COP26 is set to fail like all 25 predecessors. The BRICS nations have already rejected the Net Zero agenda. Yet a golden bridge exists, which reconciles economic growth, environmental stewardship, and the security of the Free World. Crossing it will take us to the high-energy, low-pollution future that will be freely chosen in open markets and hence spontaneously adopt[1]ed. It is a gas bridge to new types of nuclear power.

 And of course, he is right, COP26 was a failure.

Click here to see the entire posting.

cbdakota

We can see that Solar Cycle (SC) activity is pretty closely reflected in Global Temperature.  Look at the chart below. The Y axis indicates the number of sunspots. Sunspots are a proxy for solar activity. The more spots the more active the SC is. The blue peaks shown on the chart are representative of the 25 SCs that have been well charted over the years. Charting began when Galileo looked at the Sun through his telescope on 1610. Sunspots were observed and counted. But scientific counting was instituted about 1755.

Here is what the NASA Earth Observatory had to say about SCs and global temperature:

 “From 1650 to 1710, temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere plunged when the Sun entered a quiet phase now called the Maunder Minimum. During this period, very few sunspots appeared on the surface of the Sun, and the overall brightness of the Sun decreased slightly. Already in the midst of a colder-than-average period called the Little Ice Age, Europe and North America went into a deep freeze: alpine glaciers extended over valley farmland; sea ice crept south from the Arctic; and the famous canals in the Netherlands froze regularly—an event that is rare today:”

The Dalton Minimum is also shown on this chart. Some solar scientists believe that the period containing the Maunder and Dalton Minimums continued on until the 1940s and they call it the “little ice age. Solar activity was waning. Temperatures followed.

Then came the Modern Maximum. Global temperatures began rising from roughly 1940-1950s until 2000.                                                                                                                                  

The path from cooling to warming is shown on this NOAA chart below. The warming is closely related to the Modern Maximum.  

Then for a period of about 20 years, the global temperatures plateaued. The two very powerful El Ninos occurred, one right after another. That is shown on the chart below.

Carbon Dioxide was still rising during this period of hardly any growth in the global temperature. The solar cycles were becoming less active.

What is to say about El Ninos? This is what Wikipedia says:

It is believed that El Niño has occurred for thousands of years.^[11] For example, it is thought that El Niño affected the Moche in modern-day Peru. Scientists have also found chemical signatures of warmer sea surface temperatures and increased rainfall caused by El Niño in coral specimens that are around 13,000 years old.^[12] Around 1525, when Francisco Pizarro made landfall in Peru, he noted rainfall in the deserts, the first written record of the impacts of El Niño.^[12] Modern day research and reanalysis techniques have managed to find at least 26 El Niño events since 1900, with the 1982–83, 1997–98 and 2014–16 events among the strongest on record.^[13][14][15]

I have highlighted two sentences in bold.

First, El Ninos have been going on for thousands of years before the industrial use of fossil fuels. They are natural occurrences.

Second, the strongest El Ninos on record have occurred during and following the Modern Maximum.

I have been warned that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. But it does not mean that correlation can’t mean causation

I have quoted NASA saying that the Maunder minimum was caused by exceptionally low solar activity.  NASA’s chart expects SC 25 activity to drop.

Examination of the charts seem to correlate SC activity to global temperatures. Rising when the Modern Maximum occurs and falling when low activity SC occur.

The plateau in the early part of this century suggests that Solar activity is more likely to be controlling the global temperature than is CO2. The fact that El Ninos are natural rather that caused by CO2 accumulation is important information. Further, the most powerful El Ninos have come at a time of very active SCs.

Different theories are being proposed as to why global temperature fall when SC activity is low. Cosmic rays, change in solar UV emission, solar irradiance variation etc. While the warmers are quick to tell you that the irradiance only changes about 0.15% so that it has no effect. When you learn that accurate measurement of irradiance was first accomplished in 1979 you realize that is a small sample.

I am certain that someone will precisely show that the peaks and valleys do not exactly coincide with my assertions. But they are close enough to tell the story. And NASA seems to be on board. We do not know a lot about the sun. Lags and leads may result from the activity changes of the sun. The oceans are a key factor. They make their effects in slow motion.

This blog’s charter is that solar activity is what controls global temperatures, and I am sticking to it.

cbdakota  

For your information, I have a Wikipedia chart detailing SCs for you, below.

Solar Cycle	Start (Minimum)	Smoothed minimum ISN (start of cycle)	Maximum	Smoothed maximum ISN	Average spots per day	Time of Rise (years)	Duration (years)	Spotless days[10][11]
Solar cycle 1	1755-02	14.0	1761-06	144		6.3	11.3
Solar cycle 2	1766-06	18.6	1769-09	193		3.3	9.0
Solar cycle 3	1775-06	12.0	1778-05	264		2.9	9.3
Solar cycle 4	1784-09	15.9	1788-02	235		3.4	13.6
Solar cycle 5	1798-04	5.3	1805-02	82		6.8	12.3
Solar cycle 6	1810-08	0.0	1816-05	81		5.8	12.8
Solar cycle 7	1823-05	0.2	1829-11	119		6.5	10.5
Solar cycle 8	1833-11	12.2	1837-03	245		3.3	9.7
Solar cycle 9	1843-07	17.6	1848-02	220		4.6	12.4
Solar cycle 10	1855-12	6.0	1860-02	186	92	4.2	11.3	561
Solar cycle 11	1867-03	9.9	1870-08	234	89	3.4	11.8	942
Solar cycle 12	1878-12	3.7	1883-12	124	57	5.0	11.3	872
Solar cycle 13	1890-03	8.3	1894-01	147	65	3.8	11.8	782
Solar cycle 14	1902-01	4.5	1906-02	107	54	4.1	11.5	1007
Solar cycle 15	1913-07	2.5	1917-08	176	73	4.1	10.1	640
Solar cycle 16	1923-08	9.4	1928-04	130	68	4.7	10.1	514
Solar cycle 17	1933-09	5.8	1937-04	199	96	3.6	10.4	384
Solar cycle 18	1944-02	12.9	1947-05	219	109	3.3	10.2	382
Solar cycle 19	1954-04	5.1	1958-03	285	129	3.9	10.5	337
Solar cycle 20	1964-10	14.3	1968-11	157	86	4.1	11.4	285
Solar cycle 21	1976-03	17.8	1979-12	233	111	3.8	10.5	283
Solar cycle 22	1986-09	13.5	1989-11	214	106	3.2	9.9	257
Solar cycle 23	1996-08	11.2	2001-11	180	82	5.3	12.3	619
Solar cycle 24	2008-12	2.2	2014-04	116	49	5.3	11.0	914
Solar cycle 25	2019-12	1.8		Progressive: 25 (Apr 2021) [Same point last cycle: 21]				267 (Nov 9, 2021) (Same point last cycle: 331)
Average		9.0		178.7		4.4	11.04

A posting by EURACTIV claims that they have obtained  a document  that  would allow financing nuclear power generating plants; and for the time being, natural gas  (NG) based plants.   New NG facilities would have some  restriction on CO2 emissions.  

It is being opposed by the Alarmists. The EURACTIV posting says: “

“This proposal is a scientific disgrace that would deal a fatal blow to the taxonomy,” said Henry Eviston, spokesman on sustainable finance at WWF European Policy Office.

“It would severely damage the EU’s sustainable finance agenda and the EU Green Deal. It must be firmly rejected by the Commission and opposed by all member states,” he added in a statement.

However, it does look like this is going to be done.  The EURACTIV  posting adds:

“It comes in the wake of declarations by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who said the EU executive would soon table proposals on gas and nuclear as part of the bloc’s green finance rulebook.

“We need more renewables. They are cheaper, carbon-free and homegrown,” von der Leyen wrote on Twitter after an EU summit meeting two weeks ago where leaders debated the bloc’s response to rising energy prices.

“We also need a stable source, nuclear, and during the transition, gas. This is why we will come forward with our taxonomy proposal,” she added.”

It is becoming more apparent to the Europeans that wind and solar are unreliable sources. This winter is forecast to be quite cold and the recent months have been less windy and sunlight reducing renewables power generation.  More coal and natural gas use has been required to keep the lights on.

cbdakota

The Dalily Mail covers the arrival of the participants to the COP 26.  The Mail leads with:

“Hypocrite airways? Jeff Bezos’s £48m Gulf Stream leads parade of 400 private jets into COP26 including Prince Albert of Monaco, scores of royals and dozens of ‘green’ CEOs – as huge traffic jam forces empty planes to fly 30 miles to park

• MailOnline watched as plane after plane of dignitaries landed in Glasgow and Edinburgh for COP26 meeting
• Prince Albert of Monaco was among those choosing to fly private – according to an analysis of flight records
• Bank of America, which in PR documents boasts of its ‘commitment to sustainability’, owned one of the jets 
• Prince Charles is among those travelling by non-commercial plane from G20 in Rome, MailOnline can reveal””

Follows with:

“President Joe Biden will generate an estimated 2.2 million pounds of carbon during his trip to Europe to speak on the perils of climate change.  

The gigantic carbon footprint is comprised of 2.16 million pounds of carbon dioxide generated by the four large planes that comprise his airborne entourage on the trip to Italy and Scotland, where the president will speak at the COP26 summit on change in Glasgow, with the remainder emitted by Biden’s cars. 

His fleet is comprised of the heavily modified Boeing 747 he travels on, known as Air Force One when the president is on board, an identical decoy, and two huge C-17 Globemaster planes to carry his battalion of cars and helicopters.

Those jets each belch out an average of 54 pounds of carbon per mile flown. An average American would generate 0.365 pounds of carbon for if they flew a similar distance – just under 10,000 miles – on a regular scheduled flight.” 

It is said that the Biden’s Party is some 800 people. 

The Mail covers Boris Johnson’s greetings to the participants.  He compares the COP with James Bond out to save the world.  And he uses “facts” that are made-up hysterical rantings of the Alarmists and the Great Reset People who have stated that their objective is to kill capitalism.

The coverage is extensive. Full of photos and sideline stories about the $2 million Bill Gates Birthday party given to him by Jeff Bezos. 

The link to the Daily Mail article is  here.

cbdakota