Let us examine the results of the German plan to be rid of fossil fuels. They have recently lost Russian natural gas when Putin closed the valve.  So how is that working out:

 From the Manhattan Contrarian  posting “Great Idea For U.S. Energy Policy: Let’s Follow The Example Of Germany!:

“But hang on a second. After more than a decade of a crash program to build wind turbines and solar panels, doesn’t Germany have more than enough of them to supply all of the electricity it could ever possibly use? You would think so, but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, in 2020 (latest year given) Germany used 500,000 GWh of electricity, which would mean that its average usage (divide by 8760) was about 57 GW. Its peak usage (according to Montel) is about 100 GW. So if it had dispatchable generation resources (fossil fuel, nuclear, hydro) of about 120 GW, Germany should have a more than sufficient 20% margin and plenty of electricity. Instead Germany has vastly more generation capacity, 248 GW (again from the U.S. EIA for 2020). Of that, 54 GW is solar and 62 GW is wind, a total of 116 GW between those two, well more than its entire peak usage, and more than double average usage. But you can’t count on any of it when you need it. The small amount of nuclear (8 GW) is on the way out. So they can’t get rid of the natural gas as backup, and with fracking banned in their own country and also throughout Western Europe, they are left completely dependent on natural gas from Russia”.

 
On September 18, Germany’s wind electricity production, according to the Electricity Maps app, was about 20 Gwatts ,   But on September 21, the wind is producing only about 2 Gwatts.   And we know that solar cells can only make electricity when the sun is shining.   

Nowhere is there an example of a nation operating successfully on wind turbines and solar cells without backup.  And those that have tried, have been failures. Germany by reputation, should be a nation,  if it is possible, of making renewables successful  without fossil fuel backup but they cannot.    

Do you think your legislators and mainstream media understand this or are they just planning to ruin the USA?  Great Reset anybody?

And the beat goes on.

Despite Europe’s mess they have made, and particularly in Germany, the “European Investment Bank Head Rejects NatGas Funding for African Countries”.    The Bank’s President, Werner Hoyer, insists that the Africans must not use natural gas in their plans to provide electricity for their citizens.

The African nations will be unable to meet their countries electrical energy needs  that are dependent on the unpredictable wind and sun sources

cbdakota

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.

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

“It is already clear, before Cop26 has begun, that the gap between climate ambition and action won’t be closed in Glasgow.”

That comment comes from the posting by Climate Home News a committed alarmist supporter. The posting continues:

“If countries meet their 2030 emission targets in full, global heating could be limited to 2.6-2.7C this century, according to the UN Emissions Gap report. Collective ambition needs to be seven times higher to align with the most ambitious 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement.

So the UK Cop26 presidency is considering a proposal for the final Glasgow outcome to demand another round of updated nationally determined contributions (NDCs) by 2023.”

Pakistan’s climate minster voices the emerging economies resistance to the new round of nationally determined contributions, when he says:

“This talk of another round of [climate plans] will just feed into the hot air which is already plenty in the Cop process,” 

“The huge gap between what is already in the NDCs and what is actually being implemented needs to be plugged instead of another round of updating NDCs. Let’s talk climate action and not bureaucratic and endless updating of meaningless NDCs.”

What the emerging nations want is the money that the Paris Agreement committed the developed nations to supply. This is the response from those wealthy nations:

“On Monday wealthy nations announced that they won’t meet a long-overdue commitment to mobilise $100bn a year between 2020 and 2025 before 2023 –providing developing countries with no means or incentives to up their targets.”

And Indonesia echoes the other developing nations:

“But for Esther Tamara, a researcher at the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia, the lack of finance for developing countries will be “a huge stumbling block” to agree to more climate efforts”

“Like Pakistan and Indonesia, India is a member of a group of “like-minded” developing countries that emphasises the historic responsibility of rich countries to cut emissions deeper and faster. In a statement last week, the group accused the Cop26 host of going “against climate justice” by calling on all to set mid century net zero targets.

”The Alarmists are fully responsible for this squabble. For years now, it has been clear that the climate models used to predict the future global temperatures are rigged to give “alarmingly high” and erroneous temperatures. Their objective has been to scare the general population. Unfortunately, with the help of the mainstream media, they have been very successful.

Rational scientists, also including formerly alarmist know that the temperatures will not rise to those levels and if they do get to 2C it will probably be a non-event.

The alarmists are putting the developed nations in peril. These nations will be weakened by turning their industry and populations power sources to wind and solar, so-called renewables. These sources should be labeled “unreliables” rather than renewables. Politicians are up for this transition to wind and solar because they want political power. The money people–banks, investment firms, etc –see crony capitalism profits, at least for a while before our nation collapses. Examine the goals of The Great Reset to see what I am talking about.

China is cheering this fantasy. They pretend they are going to stop using fossil fuel, but don’t let them fool you. The Western nations collapse, and China achieves its plan of becoming Masters to the world.

The problems that have been created by the alarmists are way beyond most people’s imagination.

cbdakota

I attended “The Heartland 14^th International Conference on Climate Change” held in Las Vegas on 15, 16 and 17 October 2021.  It is the third Heartland meeting on climate change I have attended.  And while the other two were excellent, this one was better.

I had been waiting for the videos of the sessions to be published before making comments. They are now available.

On Friday night, 15 October, the conference began.  The link that follows was a recording of the presentations that night.

The Frederick Seitz Memorial Award was presented to David Legates, Ph.D.  David, a friend of mine, has made enormous contributions to the science of climate change.  Some years ago, the new Governor of Delaware learned that David, a skeptic, was the State Climatologist, so she fired him.  Hardly anyone will remember the former Governor, but David has distinguished himself and he will be the Delawarean that people will remember.

His acceptance of the Seitz award and his speech begins at 15 minutes on the video.

Videos – Friday Opening Keynote, 10/15/21 – Heartland’s 14th International Conference on Climate Change. | Heartland Institute

This video contains two more presentations.  One by Anthony Watts regarding a teacher’s manual that provides our side of the theory.  Some 300,000 have been sent out to teachers.  His presentation begins at 49minutes of the video.

Following that at about 59 minutes on the video is a presentation by Justin Haskins “Climate and the Great Reset”.  THIS CONTAINS AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE.  Please listen.

You can find all the other sessions by working away from this link. 

I will have comments on some of the sessions in upcoming blogs.

cbdakota

I leave tomorrow for Las Vegas to participate in the Heartland Conference on Climate Change. This is my 3rd Heartland conference. They are really very good. Looking forward to seeing most of the big time skeptics.

cbdakota

One of my sources of information comes from the Yahoo financial app. My conviction that most political figures do not understand science was justified by Janet Yellen by a posting in the blog.  Yellen, the former chairperson of the FED, now the Treasury Secretary said the following regarding the UK’s current power problem caused by over reliance on unreliable wind and solar energy sources:

“She added that “in the case of the UK, there’s a question of what to do if the sun isn’t out and the wind doesn’t blow, and I believe there is storage technologies that can be deployed and, you know, other means to address that, and of course that has to be part of a plan to switch to renewables and address climate change.”

First of all, it does not trouble her that wind and solar can just stop producing electricity.  Second, she believes there are “storage technologies”.  She obviously has no idea how big such storage technologies would have to be to resolve anything but a minute or less loss of power for the customers being served.  Nor the extreme costs for suitable storage. Here, Here and Here. Thirdly, she does not seem to know what those “….other means to address that..” are.   I wonder if the fact that on average the sun is only available for something less than 12 hours a day has ever occurred to her.

I would have thought, because of her financial education and occupation, she would have understood why the UK and the much of Europe are facing skyrocketing prices, but she fails this one too.

“I don’t believe that the president’s program is going to lead to increases in the cost of energy,” Yellen said, referring to the fuel shortage and high gas prices in the UK and Europe more broadly.” 

I truly believe that anyone in this Administration, including her addled leader, should be required to understand the science when they are making policy of this magnitude. Congress belongs in school too.

cbdakota 

A posting  titled “Renewable Power Fuels Europe’s Energy Crisis: by the Las Vegas Review-Journal stated:

 “Europe is in the midst of a full-scale energy crisis. Unusually calm weather this year reduced wind power production in countries, including Germany and Denmark. SSE, an energy company in the United Kingdom, saw its renewable energy assets produce 32 percent less electricity than expected since April. Along with less wind, a dry summer reduced hydropower production.

The prices have skyrocketed:

“ In January 2019, the European price of a megawatt hour of electricity from natural gas was around 20 euros. That dropped to under 5 euros in May 2020 as the pandemic reduced demand. Today, it’s more than 70 euros.”

“Things are so bad that Britain recently increased output from coal plants to boost supply. But coal prices have soared, too — they have nearly quadrupled from a year ago.”

“In France, energy bills have gone up 57 percent since January. 

“The coming winter months threaten to make this worse. Shortages of gas, which is used for heat, can have deadly consequences.”

When are the public going to realize that wind and solar are unreliable and a nation will not survive if it banks everything on renewables?

 Lost in the discussion of Net Zero campaign, (the plan to cease use of fossil fuels) is that today many power sources are supplying energy. Natural gas, coal, oil, nuclear, and hydro are the backbone of a robust power supply system. Coal plants maintain a large supply of coal on their property. This supply can withstand transportation interruptions for example. Hydro usually has a large supply back up. Nuclear changes out about a ¼ or one-third of the fuel rods every 18 to 24 months so they should be able to withstand extended interruptions. Natural gas does not have a significant storage option, but the reliability of the supply pipelines is high. Solar and wind have no control over the sun or the wind; hence they cannot replace fossil fuels.

cbdakota