Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change

You can't call it a failure if it does exactly what it was designed to do.

What happened in Texas was a natural gas plant failure. It stopped delivering as designed.

Wind energy continued during that period, but at the rate that was stated for those conditions.

 

Sorry, no.

Guess again.

 

I personally chuckle when they say "It's the highest it's ever been in recorded history! omg we're gonna die!"

As if 11,000 years is a substantial amount of time when it comes to actual climate change.

 

The term "half life" is the period for something to halve its quantity.

It does not just apply to radioactivity.

With atmospheric gasses, it's important to know how long CO2 and other chemicals stay in the atmosphere before they decay, fall to Earth, or otherwise decrease in volume.

 

And in reality, that "history" goes back less than 200 years at most. Because that is about the time that most "modern scientific" instruments were created that could take direct measurements.

Everything measured before then is only extrapolation. And I am not mocking that at all, a hell of a lot can be told from extrapolation. But at the end it is still only an extrapolation, and not hard data. And that extrapolation could vary greatly.

Tree rings are often used for climate data. Often using the thickness to help determine that. Wide rings, that means great growing conditions. Narrow rings, the conditions for growing were not so great. And almost every time I hear of such, the conclusion is always "Narrow rings equals drought". Well, that is like saying all cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats. Because extreme cold weather patterns also result in narrow tree rings. One of the things that many think gives the Stradivarius their special sound is that the trees he used grew in 1816, the "Year without a summer" due to volcanic activity. Which caused trees worldwide to decrease their growth dramatically and resulted in woods that were dense with small rings for several years afterwards. And that year was not heatwaves and drought, much of North America and Europe were having hard killer frosts in late June, and even snow.

I bet if most saw tree rings from that time period without being told the year, they would yell out it was caused by draught. This is just observer bias, but the difference is that some of us recognize that. Many will never see observer bias.

 

Scientists collect samples of ancient air from glacial ice boring.

Those are not extrapolation.

 

You sure can if it was badly designed for the purpose in the first place.

That's done all the time out here in the real world. And people can go to prison for royally screwing up a design trying to make something do what it's incapable of doing.

Ultimately if there's justice, a lot of the green zealots will spend time in prison for their con game.

 

Flip-flopping in Australia.
The Australian Carbon Tax is Back
Eric Worrall
Carbon tax round 2 – After claiming in 2020 a carbon tax is no longer needed, Australia’s Prime Minister Albanese has decided to offer top emitters an “opportunity” to pay…

 

Now, you have to tie that to some real circumstance somewhere.

 

The ill advised conversions to natural gas are all due to environmentalist ninnyism that holds natural gas as a somehow acceptable "fossil fuel" because it emits less CO2. However, it also yields only 60% of the energy of solid fossil fuels to go along with emitting less CO2 so more of it is required. And it's a gas, which makes it cavitate when temperatures get too cold (P=VT), which is what it did when the temperatures got unexpectedly cold. That issue of robustness- engineering for all extremes not just usual extremes- is what makes other fossil fuels much better for power generation. Ask Green Bay or North Dakota.

The deaths occurred directly because folks listened to environmentalists and politicians rather than engineers.

Oh, and the windmills also froze which tends to be what they do when it's real cold.

Enough "real circumstances" for you?

 

The move from coal to gas is primarily driven by gas being cheaper.

However, it is true that there is a greenhouse gas advantage in going with gas instead of coal, as gas fired plants emit about 1 pound of CO2 per kwh - half that of coal.

Also, gas fired plants have advantages in being dispatchable - allowing for rapid increases and decreases in power output without wasting fossil fuel.

 

So you're like the rest of the climate zealots, it's okay to sacrifice a few hundred lives on occasion in the pursuit of the mythical goal of climate salvation. Like Scrooge said, "Well then they'd better get on with dying and decrease the surplus population!" No thanks Davos, I'll take a hard pass on that.

 

Experience doesn't grade on the curve.
Confessions of an Environmentalist
Charles Rotter
Just because you feel like you’re doing the right thing doesn’t mean you are. . . .

 

Enthusiasm for renewables is largely powered by ignorance.

Academics and the grid. Part II: Are they studying the right things?
Posted on January 9, 2023 by curryja | 66 comments
By Planning Engineer (Russell Schussler)

Influential academics as a body are encouraging an energy transition to renewables, discussing remote hopes and ignoring huge obstacles and greater costs, which will worsen reliability and eventually result in unbearable blackouts.

Continue reading →

 

Wait - I pointed out that the primary reason for the move from coal to gas is based on economics. Gas is cheaper, and starting before the turn of the century the gas industry began finding ways to hugely increase gas production.

Clean energy is far cheaper and has been increasing enough to start being noticeable in US energy production.

And, no industry has a god given right to pollute or devastate the land. You can read up on the effects of the coal fired power industry. Greenhouse gas emissions are only on piece of this problem.

The US energy direction hasn't been known. The following shows the progression of the mix of fuel types used for energy in the USA:

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php

 

Solar business failure in Australia.
$30 Billion Sun Cable Solar Mega Project Enters Administration
Eric Worrall
Sun Cable, which planed to export up to 20GW of solar energy from the Australian outback to Singapore, has entered voluntary administration after an unresolvable dispute between backers. . . .

 

US Climate Is Getting Less Extreme, Not More
Guest Blogger
The fact that the US, and for that matter the UK, is not seeing such effects fundamentally undermines their credibility. . . .

 

Australians may lead the world in poor decisions.

Rapid technological innovation – not harmful renewables policy – key to lighting our energy future
Posted on January 20, 2023 by curryja | 38 comments
by Judith Curry

Framework for a robust transition of our energy systems.

Continue reading →
Here is the text of my latest oped for Australia’s Sky News:

Australia’s rapid transition of electric power systems away from fossil fuels is introducing substantial new risks to their electric power systems. A transition of the electric power system that produces less reliable and more expensive electricity acts as a tourniquet that restricts the lifeblood of modern society. . . .

 

@Jack Hays

https://www.yahoo.com/news/earths-inner-core-may-started-161117093.html?a20_comeback_from_auth=1

Earth's inner core may have started spinning other way: study




Another result of man made global warming


Moi

​

 

Nothing to do with global warming.

 

Another denier .

Please, "how so"
Nothing to do or . . . .


Moi

Only Tesla considers EMF exposure
esp. to the back seat where babies ride!
​

 

Sorry, but you lost me.

 

Evidence says offshore wind development is killing lots of whales
Guest Blogger
Basically the humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016 and continued high thereafter. . . .

 

There is something interesting about studying geology. And that is realizing that the most "stable" climates tend to be when it is at either extreme.

At one, you have the periods of "snowball Earth", or massive ice ages. There, the climate largely stagnates, with little change for thousands of years or longer.

The other extreme is when the planet has left an Ice Age. Now granted, that is also when tropical storms are the strongest, but overall and globally that is largely insignificant. Such storms primarily affect the oceans and coastal regions (and only selected ones at that), not the rest of the surface. So while a tropical storm slamming into the US SE coast or China may be devastating, that will have little to no impact on Europe, or Africa, South America, or the Rocky Mountains.

And just knowing about things like basic science, one should know that such periods are not the driest in history, but the wettest. Cold climates produce deserts, because cold air can retain damned near no water. That is why the largest deserts on the planet are not in Africa, but in Antarctica and Asia. The cold air can not sustain a good precipitation level, so they remain dry. But the hottest areas on our planet like East Asia, South America, Africa, and the SE US are the wettest areas of the planet. Because the hot air retains so damned much water that it can be released in torrential rainfalls.

I blame most of this on the ignorance of people, and others playing into that ignorance to "push a message". But every time I hear some "climate expert" screaming that the planet is warming and that is causing droughts, I just want to bash my head and theirs into a wall. Because that is not how it works, it's actually the exact opposite.

 

Dead whales bedevil Biden's massive wind energy push

Strandings in the Atlantic, supply chain woes and fossil fuel allies create headwinds in the race to install thousands of enormous offshore wind turbines.

Central to reducing greenhouse emissions »