Category Archives: AGW

How Many Years Of No Global Warming Are Required To Disprove CO2 As The Primary Factor In Global Warming?


The WoodforTrees Chart below shows no Global warming since 1997 to date.  The data used to construct the chart came from Hadley Center and University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit—yes this is the CRU of Climategate fame.

(click on charts for clarity.)

During this period, carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased from about 362 ppm in 1997 to 396ppm by mid-year 2012.  (See atmospheric CO2 chart below.)  If CO2 is the potent forcing agent claimed by the proponents of the man-made global warming theory, then why are the global temperatures flat?   15 years of no statistically significant global temperature increase are in the books. When is enough, enough.  Last I heard, the warmers had lengthened the needed time to 17 years.  Want to bet that when 17 years arrives and the temperature shows no increase, that they will want to lengthen the time needed, once again.

 

This posting is not to deny that for 10,000 years or so the globe has been warming.   Rather it is to demonstrate that no one really has proven the cause to be other than “natural”.

Do you hear a chorus of “cherrypicking” from the warmers? Please note that their CO2 theory was postulated during a period of rising global temperatures and a corresponding atmospheric CO2 increase.  We said then, about their theory, that correlation does not prove causation.  And we were right.   15 years of no correlation proves no causation.

cbdakota

Volt: Refund Policy Allows For Tax Credit Abuse and Other Issues


General Motors (GM) provides a 60-day money back policy for all Chevy models.   So if you buy a Volt you can claim a $7500 federal tax credit.  Then 59 days later, return it and get your money back.  But, you may get to keep the tax credit.  According to a posting by Mark Modica, the IRS tax form for plug-in vehicle credit does not have a minimum time requirement for the buyer to own their qualified vehicle.   Ok, so it is doubtful that anyone will buy a series of Volts in order to accumulate tax credits.  But this is just another glitch in the Volt epic.

So how is the Volt doing now as opposed to how GM felt about the Volt in the days before the first sales?  In a November, 2010 posting in WardsAuto the following was reported:

In 2012, the automaker plans to reach production capacity for the Volt at its Detroit-Hamtramck, MI, assembly plant here with about 45,000 units annually for U.S. consumption. Including export to markets such as Canada and China, capacity could reach 60,000 cars annually.

Well, they are missing the 2012 sales forecast by a wide margin.  Sales were not too good even when gasoline prices approached $4 per gallon earlier this year (2012). Will it get any better if the price of gasoline continues it’s current decline?

And in that same WardsAuto posting the following was reported:

General Motors Co. executives call the new-for-’11 Chevrolet Volt a key first step in the electrification of all its products, while also confirming long-held assumptions the car will not make money in the first years of production. However, the typical all-new vehicle program for an automaker averages $1 billion. Given its sophisticated technology, the Volt likely will cost much more to develop, build and sell.

It can’t be making money now if 45,000 units are just breakeven.  Somehow a lot of cars will have to be sold to amortize the $1 billion cost of development.

cbdakota

 

Why Does The US Have The Lead On Shale Gas?


The United States (US) is now ranked as the world’s leading producer of natural gas.  The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) says that this lead is partly due to the abundant shale resources we have—though many other countries have those too.   Partly due to our technological leadership in developing hydraulic fracturing (fracking)—but these techniques are known all over the world now.  The edge is really a result of private ownership of subsurface mineral resources.   Almost no major country recognizes full subsurface private property rights, except the US.  Quoting from the WJS: “….this blessing of American jurisprudence helps explain one of the few bright patches in the Obama economy—the booming production of shale gas and increasingly, oil.”

There is a profit motive driving the property owner as well as the driller. Typically the property owners get a royalty checks from the driller representing a percentage of the worth of the value of oil produced. Often the royalty percentage is 12.5%.  (My home in Texas was built well after the East Texas oil boom.  By then all the subsurface mineral rights had been sold/leased and my deed spelled out that I had no ownership. There were number of wells back in the woods behind my house. Someone was getting royalty checks, but alas, it was not I.)

But many people in North Dakota (Bakken Shale) and Pennsylvania (Marcellus Shale), for example, have leased their mineral rights and natural gas is being produced.  And the landowners are getting royalty checks!

France and Bulgaria have banned fracking. Because these governments own the subsurface property rights, there has been no pushback from the landowners.   In other countries where fracking has not been banned, the governments are moving at a glacial pace.

Quoting the WSJ: “ ….the deeper lesson is that this is a revolution that came about not through government planning or foresight, but through a combination of individual risk-taking and private property. “

Thank heavens for these privately owned resources.  Unfortunately, favorable outcomes are not happening where the US government has control of natural gas and oil.  The Obama Administration puts up road blocks in the way of the exploitation of resources found in places like  Off-Shore, Federal lands, and the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

cbdakota

Solar Cycle 24 Update June 2012


The Sunspots and F10.7 flux are slightly lower in June than in the previous month.  April next year is still the expert’s rough timing for Cycle 24 maximum.   After the usual charts, a chart is added  showing how Solar Cycles 21, 22 and 23 compare with the current Cycle 24.    This is a good illustration of how much less active Cycle 24 is. This chart is from:     http://www.solen.info/solar/

(click on the charts for clarity)

These charts would have been posted earlier but a death within the family has occupied my time for the past several weeks.

cbdakota

June Global Temperature Update


The UAH satellite global temperature for June 2012 departure from average is +0.37C.   The upward trend from last month continues.

I am adding in its entirety, a discussion regarding satellite temperatures by Dr. Spencer.

Latest Global Average Tropospheric Temperatures

Since 1979, NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere. The signals that these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies are directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere. Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets (see here and here)that represent the piecing together of the temperature data from a total of eleven instruments flying on eleven different satellites over the years. As of early 2012, our most stable instrument for this monitoring is the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite and providing data since late 2002.

The graph above represents the latest update; updates are usually made within the first week of every month. Contrary to some reports, the satellite measurements are not calibrated in any way with the global surface-based thermometer records of temperature. They instead use their own on-board precision redundant platinum resistance thermometers calibrated to a laboratory reference standard before launch.

cbdakota

Volt And Leaf June Sales


The good news is that Chevrolet Volt sales for June were 1,760 versus the previous month’s Volt sales of 1,680.  The bad news is that at the end of June there were 5,300 Volts in stock, an 82 day-supply.  The Volt production line has been idled twice so far this year because of low demand.

Meanwhile the news is not particularly good for the Nissan Leaf because June sales were only 535 and that brings the year-to-date total sales to 3,418.  Nissan still insists that they will sell 20,000 Leafs this year.

cbdakota

 

Another Solar Energy Company To File For Bankruptcy


Abound Solar, one of four solar energy companies provided loans by the Department of Energy is expected to file for bankruptcy protection the first week in July.  The company received $70 million in federal loans.  The company employs 125.  Solyndra was one of the four receiving loans, and as you probably know, it has gone bankrupt, too.

Slate.com posts “Why No One Should Be Surprised That Another Obama-Backed Solar Startup Is Going Bust.”  The tone of their posting is that Conservatives will be gleeful about this company going bust.  Conservatives do not get off on failures of companies and lost jobs.  In fact the people planning on causing people to loose jobs are those in the current administration doing their best to put all the people employed in the coal industry out of jobs.  If that objective is realized, as directed by President Obama,  it will make 125 jobs lost look insignificant.

Conservatives want R&D monies to be expended on solar cell research.  Not for the government to be picking and choosing businesses for which their record in one of failure.  The Administrations efforts to strong-arm wind and solar has so far yielded little to be proud of.  These operations are only valuable to their cronies that take little to no risk all at the expense of the taxpayer and specifically the ratepayers that have to absorb the vastly overpriced product .  The Energy Information Agency of the US Department of Energy categorizes wind and solar as Non-Dispatchable TechnologiesThat means their delivery is too unreliable for the grids to be useable.   These technologies are not ready for PRIME TIME.   Wind and Solar will remain non-viable until such time that low cost,  large-scale energy storage is developed.

Yes, we know as Slate tells us,  the Chinese have dropped the prices of solar cells to a point where our domestic companies can not compete.  But even the cheaper solar cells don’t make solar farms viable.

cbdakota

Senators Ask If Fisker Loan Is Appropriate


Senator Thune (R-SD) and Grassley (R-IA) have asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu if the $529 million loan granted in 2010 to Fisker is appropriate.   Fisker has received $193 million to date with the remainder being held by the Energy Department while they review the status of certain (undisclosed) benchmarks that Fisker is required to meet.

Thune and Grassley question why monies should be given to Fisker at all when Fisker is partly owned by Qatar.  The Qatar Investment Authority– a branch of the Qatar government–owns about 10% to 15% of Fisker according to Wiki.    Dr. Kamel Maamria, head of the General Investments Portfolio and Executive Director of Qatar Holding LLC, is a member of Fisker’s Board of Directors. The Senators asked in the letter: “Why should the American taxpayer have to accept the credit risk of a company owned by a foreign government?”

According to AutoblogGreen: ”Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera argues the loan was an appropriate part of the federal government’s effort to help boost fleetwide fuel economy and said Fisker’s delays are “common for start-ups,” according to the report.

Doesn’t sound like Mr. LaVera answered the question.

cbdakota

Offshore Wind Turbines Concrete Bases Failing


An offshore wind farm in the Netherlands was the first to discover that the concrete used to attach the turbines to their steel foundations was eroding.  If unattended the towers could collapse.

 

 

In Britain, the same erosion has been confirmed.  Investigations are underway to determine how extensive the problem is. Britain has some 336 offshore wind turbines and it is estimated that it will require some £50million to fix if all the offshore units are involved. 

Off-shore wind turbines are at a major disadvantage as is, without more new and costly expenses being added.  According to the US  Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) the levelized cost of onshore and offshore wind turbines coming on-line in 2017 are $97/mWh and $331/mWh respectively.  By comparison, the EIA’s levelized cost for a natural gas advanced combined cycle unit coming on-line in 2017 is $66/mWh.  And with the price of natural gas dropping in the US, the natural gas unit will be even more favorable price-wise.

cbdakota

 

 

 

 

Climate Model Forecasts Proven Wrong


Where would the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW, aka: man-made global warming) be if it weren’t for the climate models that forecast devastatingly high temperatures, sea level change that will make hundreds of millions of people homeless, mass extinctions of all manner of creatures, etc? What if those forecasts consistently were in error?  You would have to conclude, that the warmers don’t have a viable theory and they would quickly fade away.  Well, the forecasts are consistently in error and warmers still have not faded away.  So what is going on?

Because it is Father’s Day, let’s look at James Hansen’s (father of the current man-made global warming cult) forecast presented to the US Congress in 1988:

Chart from: James Hansen et al. Global Climate Changes as Forecast by Goddard Institute for Space Studies Three-Dimensional Model journal of Geophysical Research.

The chart forecasts a global temperature increase that will be caused by different levels of CO2 emissions.  Scenarios “A” (blue) which postulated an increase in CO2 emissions by 1.5% per year
 and “B” (green): constant increase in CO2 emissions after 2000
 and “C” (red): no increase in CO2 emissions after 2000The black line is the actual global temperature.

Since 2000, the CO2 emissions have increased about 2.5% per year.  So one would expect the observed temperature to have exceeded the blue line “A”. Yet we see the actual temperature increase matching or perhaps coming in lower than that forecast by the red line “C” that was based upon a forecast of O% per year increase in CO2 after 2000. How many ways can you say FAIL!!!

Hansen’s influential presentation was widely broadcast and had a profound effect on Congress.  If you had been in the Capitol that day, you might have become concerned.   But with time, the Hansen forecast has been demonstrated to be very wrong.   The Chart above came from Wattsupwiththat (WUWT) blog and the comments by readers to the WUWT posting are quite interesting.  The warmers that commented essentially said—well, sure, it was wrong but some things happened; volcanoes, less fluorocarbons in the atmosphere, less methane in the atmosphere and the positive feedback he used is now imagined to be less than it was imagined to be at the time of the Hansen forecast.

Wow, that is a lot of things going wrong considering we are still being told that only CO2 really matters.  Isn’t it amazing that when the forecasts play out for a lot of years (in Hansen’s case, 24 years), only then can you find out if they are really any good.  Forecasting today what the world will look like in 2100 is an interesting exercise but only fools would believe that it was likely to be accurate.

We know that money and control drives the warmers and the politicians to continue this charade.  But the media has bought into this lock, stock and barrel.  What drives them?  I know that bad news (fear of global warming caused catastrophe) sells more papers than good news.  And the falling readership that the mainstream media is experiencing, makes them desperate to continue echoing everything the green alarmists say.  Why are there no latter-day Woodwards and Bernsteins that want to expose the lies after some 20 years of flat global temperatures and failed predictions?   Skeptics are gaining the upper hand with regard to public opinion, but if the media owned up to the facts and began questioning the AGW theory, this round of Lysenkoism could be ended.

cbdakota