CHURCHVILLE, VA—President Obama has allocated $4 billion in “stimulus funds” to help advance the “smart grid,” which is intended to seamlessly integrate all our new solar and wind power into the national supply of electricity. Much of the $4 billion will be spent to install 20 million new digital “smart meters.” These meters will instantly tell the power company how to deploy its varied generating sources most effectively.

The “stimulus fund” goal is to create new “green” jobs. The Washington Post estimates that deploying the 20 million smart meters will create jobs for about 1,600 installers, and keep them employed for about five years. The manufacturing process for the meters will be highly automated, so only a few hundred jobs would be involved there. Still, 2,000 green jobs for five years, paid for by stimulus funds, must be good. Or is it?

Let’s think this through.  The smart meters report automatically to the power company. We’ll lose 28,000 existing, permanent jobs for meter-readers. The Washington Post says all our “green” energy efforts are likely to produce only tens of thousands of jobs, not the millions of jobs needed to keep America at full employment.

A good Spanish study, led by Dr. Gabriel Calzada of Juan Carlos University in Madrid, found that every renewable-energy job created by the Spanish government has destroyed 2.2 other energy-related jobs. Worse, every megawatt of expensive “green energy” has destroyed 5.39 jobs in non-energy sectors as products became too expensive for consumers to buy—or as manufacturing shifted to countries without energy taxes. President Obama has held Spain up as a country for us to emulate, which only emphasizes that Calzada’s study is likely an Obama-valid blueprint for our own energy future.  

Note, by the way, that China has already become the world’s major source of wind turbines, cutting further into Obama’s “green job” expectations. The wind turbine manufacturing will shortly be joined by our steel and aluminum industries, fertilizer plants and many other production facilities when the U.S. energy penalty taxes mount up.

Unfortunately, the $4 billion doesn’t replace our massive existing investments in coal-fired and gas-fired power plants, in gasoline refineries and service stations, in natural gas pipelines and drilling rigs. In reality, the renewables will subtract from our standard of living.

In 2007, U.S. subsidies to coal-fired electricity were 44 cents per megawatt hour, compared with $23.37 in subsidies for wind turbine megawatts, and $24.34 in subsidies per solar megawatt. That’s a fair measure of the added cost for renewables, except that wind and solar megawatts must also be billed for the additional costs of the fossil fueled plants that must be built and kept in “spinning reserve” in case the wind drops or clouds cover the sun. Denmark, a world leader in wind, has not decommissioned any fossil-power generators because of its “spinning reserve” requirement.

As Obama’s energy taxes force reductions in coal and oil production, the price of U.S. energy will double and triple—and so will the costs of the things we buy. Clearly, if the President wasn’t afraid of man-made global warming, we would not have spent the $4 billion on the “smart grid” at this moment of recession. Nor would we be planning massive and ineffective wind farms.

We might, instead, be designing new coal-fired power plants with the Department of Energy’s latest discoveries in clean-burn technology.

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

Source: Gabriel Calzada; “Study of the Effects on Employment of Public Aid to Renewable Energy Sources,” Juan Carlos University, Madrid; March, 2009.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Once again the “rich countries” have managed to yank prosperity away from the Third World. And at Christmas too.

 

We’d promised them billions of unearned dollars in guilt payments for something called “global warming.” They don’t pay that much attention to thermometers, and weather is something they mostly live with rather than forecast.

 

• But we ourselves had warned them their islands were about to sink beneath the waves. It hasn’t happened yet, but the computer models say it will be so.
• We warned them their food crops would begin to fail—though crop yields around the earth have so far continued to increase.
• We told them that wild species like the polar bear would go extinct—if not yet then sometime soon.

 

“The heaviest burden of global warming will fall on the poorest countries,” said the best and brightest of our thinkers and climate modelers. “We must pay billions to the third world to finance greener energy systems so they won’t burn coal or kerosene.”

 

Then, at Copenhagen—the “last chance” for humans to save the world—we decided not to save it. Can we blame the Third World for being angry and mystified? 

 

Villagers on the South Pacific island of Tanna still worship a ghostly American named John Frum who was stationed there during World War II. Every February 15^th , the islanders stage a ceremony, complete with GI “uniforms,” bamboo rifles, and an American flag. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder told writer Paul Raffaele of Smithsonian Magazine in 2008.

 

Such “cargo cults” were common when primitive peoples were visited by sailors who had compasses and chronometers, and later radios and TVs. Third World peoples mostly still haven’t seen our shipyards, railroads, and nitrogen fertilizer, so they don’t understand what supports our abundance.

 

They don’t know how we learned that global warming was coming, and they haven’t seen any evidence that it will. But we said we’d make them rich, and since we decided not to, they’re unhappy.

 

The Chinese, of course, are different. They’ve got 4,000 years of court records, detailing how Chinese crops and wild animals shifted north with the repeated global wamings during the Bronze Age, the Roman Empire and the Medieval period—and then shifted back south during the intervening cold periods. Chinese researchers have studied their own ice cores and fossil pollen. They can’t have much respect for the Western computer models, which repeatedly forecast the runaway warming that hasn’t appeared. Their own thermometers have detailed the non-warming since 1998—but they’d take our carbon subsidies.

 

In the wake of Copenhagen’s collapse, my wife was asked, “With so many poor people in the world, shouldn’t we share our abundance—global warming or not?”  That’s been the hidden agenda of the hard-left through the whole global warming campaign: “spreading the wealth.”  

 

My wife, however, had spent 15 years living in four African countries. She replied she’d never vote to give American money to Africa’s tribal thugs. It would simply disappear, as have so many billions in government handouts, enriching Swiss bank accounts not creating sustainable prosperity for the people. 

 

“They aren’t poor because we’re rich,” she says correctly. “Nor are we rich because they’re poor.” In the Pacific Northwest, early Indian tribes had a culture based on “potlatch.” Whenever anyone had good fortune, they threw a party for the tribe. The wealth was spread, but no one was better off after the party than before.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Copenhagen was two weeks of uninterrupted game-playing: 

 

• CFACT conned their way aboard a Greenpeace vessel with donuts—then unfurled a banner overside reading “Ship of Lies.”

 

• China told the world it really wants to cut its carbon emissions, if the West will just pay them a trillion or so dollars to offset the higher costs of wind and solar.

   

• President Obama warned the poor countries to volunteer fossil fuel cutbacks—in exchange for $100 billion per year that nobody has agreed to pay.  

 

Our “con of the week” goes, however, to the British climate “scientists” who have been keeping the world’s “official” temperature records.  Moscow’s Institute of Economic Analysis charged last week that the “British Team,” led by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the now-infamous Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, cherry-picked Russian climate stations. They chose stations that supported the theory of recent man-made global warming, and ignored valid stations that did not. This “trick,” Russians

say, over-estimated Russia’s warming by more than half a degree Celsius. That’s no small thing; global warming since 1900 has totaled only about 0.6 degree C—and Russia has 12.5 percent of the earth’s land area.

 

Suddenly, the pieces of a massive “trick” against the human race may be falling into place: The Hadley Centre, East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit—and perhaps U.S. record-keepers too—have apparently manipulated the official temperature records to show far more warming than we’ve actually had. If you think it’s been hard to frighten us with just 0.6 degree of warming since 1900, how much harder with of half that?

 

Down in New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research shows a strong warming trend since 1900. But the Climate Science Coalition of New Zealand has examined the still-available raw data from the same temperature stations, which shows far less cooling from 1853–1909, and far less warming in recent years. The Coalition says the data was manipulated by James Salinger, a former NIWA employee—who earlier worked for East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit!

 

Years ago, Jim Goodrich, then California State Climatologist, randomly selected three groups of Golden State temperature stations—one-third each from cities, suburbs, and rural areas. He found a strong warming trend in the cities, moderate warming in the suburban stations—and no warming at all in the countryside. The IPCC has assured us they’ve “adjusted” the temperature records for the urban heat island effect—but have never revealed the size of the adjustments. Now that lack of transparency takes on a sinister tone.

 

Eugenia Kalnay used the satellite and balloon temperature records in 2001 to model what U.S. temperatures would have been over the past 50 years—without any land use changes. She found U.S. warming since 1900 would have been little more than half as high:  0.25 degree C instead of 0.45 degree C.

 

Willis Eschenbach has a post at Anthony Watts’ blog: “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero.” He examined five temperature records in the Darwin region; all five tracked each other closely. So why did the temperature station at Darwin Zero show massive “adjustment”?  Because it showed the 1880s were warmer than today? 

 

We should, of course, go back to the CRU’s original thermometer data—but the Climate Research Unit says they‘ve lost it! All they’ve kept is their “value-added product”—already adjusted in ways they can’t explain.

 

Remember this global con game scenario four years from now as you pay your quadrupled electric bill.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

Resources: 

 

“Russia Affected by Climategate,” RIA Novosti, 16 Dec., 2009; see also Anil Dawar and Will Stewart, “Climate Change ‘Lies’ by Britain,” London Daily Express, Dec. 17, 2009.

 

Terry Hurlburt, “New Zealand Climate Agency Accused of Data Manipulation,” www.examiner.com, Nov. 28, 2009.

 

Eugenia Kalnay and M. Cai, 2001, “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surfaces Temperature trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp 528-531.

 

James D. Goodridge, 1992, “Urban Bias Influences on Long-Term California Air Temperature trends,” Atmospheric Environment 26B, pp 1-7.

 

Willis Eschenbach, “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero,”www.wattsupwiththat, Dec. 8, 2009.

CHURCHVILLE, VA—A North China cave stalagmite just produced an amazingly precise record of China’s rainfall over the past 1800 years, proving that variations in the sun’s activity—through weaker monsoons and poor rice crops—helped bring down three historic Chinese dynasties (the Tang, Yuan, and Ming dynasties).

 

In contrast, the sun sent abundant rainfall for the Song Dynasty, producing rich rice harvests, social stability, and population growth through the 10^th-13^th centuries—a period known to the world as the Medieval Warming. The Chinese recorded the Song abundance in both historic documents and cave-wall paintings.

 

Paleoclimatologists used uranium-thorium dating of the layered deposits in the stalagmite, linking them to the rainfall records within a remarkable 2.5 years—thus permitting the rainfall-dynastic analysis. Lawrence Edwards of the University of Minnesota was a lead author of the study, published in the journal Science November 7, 2008.

 

The China study found that the cave stalagmite rainfall record followed solar variability even more closely than it followed the northern hemisphere’s temperatures. A strong correlation was also found between the weak monsoons of the Late Tang Period in China and a Swiss record of Alpine glaciers advancing during the cold temperatures of the 9^th century. The European glacier advance was followed by Alpine glacial retreat from the late 9^th to 14^th centuries, correlating with the Medieval Warming and the Song Dynasty’s prosperity.

 

Half a world away, the decline of the Roman Empire is reflected in the layers of a stalagmite from Soreq Cave near Jerusalem. The stalagmite, analyzed with an Ion Mass Spectrometer at the University of Wisconsin, shows the Eastern Mediterranean becoming drier as Roman and Byzantine power waned from 200 AD to 700 AD. The stalagmite record shows especially sharp drops in precipitation about 100 and 400 AD.

 

Hunger, produced by the extended droughts of the late Roman Warming may have driven the barbarian tribes from Eastern Europe and the Near East to the gates of Rome seeking food. But Rome itself may then have had grain shortages, since the Roman “granary” in North Africa also tends to get less rainfall as the warm periods wane and the tropical rain belts move back to the south. Without steady supplies of grain, the Roman hold on its Mediterranean Empire was probably doomed. 

 

The stalagmite cores “look sort of like tree rings in the cross-section,” says co-author Ian Orland, “Only instead of looking at the ring widths, we’re looking at the geochemical composition of each ring.”  Oxygen isotopes in the calcium layers and organic matter flushed into the cave by surface rain—and trapped in the mineral layers—contain the climate information.

 

This is a relatively recent way of looking at world history. Scientists have only known about the moderate, solar-driven 1,500-year climate cycle since 1984. Evidence found in ice cores, seabed sediments, ancient tree rings and fossil pollen as well as in cave stalagmites from every continent show it has produced seven previous global warmings since the last Ice Age ended 12,000 years ago. Maureen Raymo of Boston University found the cycle extending more than one million years in the microfossils of the North Atlantic seabed south of Iceland. (Nature: 392, 1998)

 

Researchers are still working to link the physical evidence of warming/cooling shifts to the events of world history while the rest of us watch the unfolding story with awe and anticipation

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol— which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom not to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP—about $300 billion per year—to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.

 

 Bad timing: The U.S. and Europe are trying to bail their financial systems out of Barney Frank’s Fanny Mae/Freddy Mac sub-prime mortgage adventure. “Climate change policies need a lot of money to be invested. However, developed countries have not made any substantive promises about how much they are going to spend on this,” said Gua Guangsheng, head of China’s Climate Change Office on Oct. 28. “And they did not fulfill some of the promises they made in the past very well either.” 

 

China, India, Brazil, and Mexico had already demanded—in July— that the developed countries cut their own emissions by 80–95 percent by 2050. Very unlikely. The EU has loudly boasted of  trying to set an 80-percent cut in its emissions, but that now looks impossible. Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are part of a “blocking force” saying says they can’t afford to give up coal and oil during a financial crisis. Especially when the only alternative is imported Russian gas; Russia recently “invaded” Georgia, many think to stop Georgian efforts to build a gas pipeline that would have competed with Russia’s.

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who helped create the Kyoto Protocol, now says that drastic cuts in CO₂ emissions are “ill-advised climate policy.”  She’s building 26 brown-coal power plants instead, and re-thinking the German promise to scuttle its nuclear power plants.   

 

Don’t spend much of your “worry time” on a new climate treaty however. Global temperatures are doing their best to tell us that CO₂ isn’t very important after all.

 

• Global thermometers stubbornly refused to rise after 1998, and have plummeted in the past two years by more than 0.5 degree C. The world is now colder than in 1940, when the Post-WWOII Industrial Revolution started spewing lots of man-made CO₂ in the first place.

 

• On October 29, the U.S. beat or tied 115 low-temperature records for the date. Alaska, which was unusually warm last year, recorded 25 degrees below zero Fahrenheit that night—beating the previous low by 4 degrees F.    

 

• London had snow in October for the first time in more than 70 years.

 

The 2007–08 temperature drop wasn’t predicted by the global climate models, but it had been predicted by the sunspots since 2000. Both the absent sunspots and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation now predict a 25–30-year global cooling. After that, the remaining enthusiasm for global warming agreements will presumably have vanished—without any big payoff to the Chinese government.

 

Meanwhile, India is about to rescue our Appalachian coal industry. India is already importing 50 million tons of coal per year, and sees our high-sulfur eastern coal as an under-priced energy resource. While New York and Philadelphia import low-sulfur coal from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, India wants to buy not just Appalachia’s coal but the mines that produce it. They note, “It’s a buyer’s market.”

 

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC and is the Director for the Center for Global Food Issues. (www.cgfi.org) He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net