Churchville, VA—James Hansen of NASA, an ardent believer in man-made warming, announced recently that “The 12-month running mean global temperature in the Goddard Space Institute analysis has reached a new record in 2010 . . . NASA, June 3, 2010. The main factor is our estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.”  The GISS figures show that recent temperatures in the Arctic have been up to four degrees C warmer than the long-term mean.

Should we be alarmed?  Probably not very.

My esteemed colleague Art Horn, at the Energy Tribune blog, has blown the whistle on Hansen and GISS. He points out that GISS has no thermometers in the Arctic! It has hardly thermometers that are even near the Arctic Circle. GISS estimates its arctic temperatures from land-based thermometers that supposedly each represent the temperatures over 1200 square kilometers. That’s a pretty heroic assumption.

Meanwhile, the Danish Meteorological Institute is publishing sea-surface temperatures from the Arctic showing a cooling trend in the Arctic oceans during melt season since about 1993. Clearly, we have no accurate measure of the real temperatures and trends in the Arctic at this moment. Probably that’s not very important. The Russians say that the Arctic has its own 70-year climate cycle. The files of the New York Times, in fact, are filled with stories from the 1920s and 1930s, clearly showing that the Arctic was as warm then as now.

But this is the moment when proposed energy taxes would start to scuttle 85 percent of the energy which powers the modern world and its lifestyles. Global climate alarmists, Hansen among them, are playing a desperate and short-sighted game of “pass the energy taxes.”

President Obama says energy taxes are a high priority—perhaps high enough to ramp up  his “health care reform” strategy.  In a lame-duck Congressional session, after the November elections, Congress persons who had already lost their seats, would vote to saddle America with energy taxes that would triple our electric bills and, according to a Harvard study, drive gas prices to $7 per gallon.

The energy taxes are intended to make fossil fuels expensive! The idea is to deliberately drive fossil fuel prices high enough to force us to stop using them. Then we’re supposed to depend on costly and erratic solar and wind power. (Biomass can never produce much energy: biofuel crops would take too much land, and we can’t make ethanol out of cellulose sources.)

The man-made global warming believers have invested 20 years in their campaign to convince us of CO_2-driven climate calamity. To their chagrin, the earth’s temperatures started to trend downward in 2007.

• The sunspot index, which has a much stronger correlation with our thermometer record than CO₂ (79% versus 22%) started predicting the cooling in 2000. The sun is still in a long cold-predicting minimum.
• In 2008, NASA itself told us that Pacific had shifted into its cooling mode. The history of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation indicates a 30-year cooling phase, the opposite of the 1976–1998 warming trend.

They’re panicked about losing the whole ball game. They feel they must get an energy tax on the books before the earth has a chance to resume the recent-and-predicted cooling trend. They imagine that if the law gets on the books, a restart of the cooling wouldn’t push the next Congress to repeal the energy tax!

They might even be right, though it seems a stretch given the American people’s already-massive Obama-debt and the demonstrated history that tax cuts grow the economy and tax increases strangle it.

It’s a desperate time, not for the earth, but for the global warming campaigners.

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

Sources:

James Hansen et al., “Global Surface Temperature Change,” draft paper released for comment, to be submitted to Reviewers of Geophysics.

Art Horn, “Last June was the Hottest Ever?” Energy Tribune.com; August 5, 2010.

DMI Center for Ocean and Ice; http://Ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/

CHURCHVILLE, VA—As I write, a strong wind is blowing across the Alleghany Mountains onto my house. It’s bringing an “Arctic Clipper” that will drop my temperatures this weekend to a frigid and unusual 6 degrees F. Why can’t I get some good from this chill wind—with a wind turbine to harvest the “free” energy?

 

Out in Oregon, General Electric has just announced a big wind project: 338 turbines, rated at 845 MW. GE claims it will power for 235,000 homes, and is applying for the appropriate federal subsidies.

 

Will the wind turbines power 235,000 homes?  Don’t bet on it. My friend Donald Hertzmark—an energy economist—warns the power deliveries from this wind project are likely to average only 25 percent of its rated capacity. That would serve only 58,000 homes, not 235,000.

 

But Hertzmark says even this is too high because the wind is highly variable. The Texas power grid’s experience is to rely on no more than 9 percent of the wind farm’s rated capacity. That would reduce GE’s real subsidy claim to about 21,000 households.

 

It gets worse.

 

Most of Oregon’s power comes from dams, and the lean period for hydropower is winter. That’s when heating demand peaks—but also when the dams have to restrict their water flow to protect fish, control flooding, and save up irrigation water for the next summer.

 

How likely is it that wind turbines can add to Oregon’s generating capacity in the midst of the winter electricity demand surge, and offset the hydroelectric generating restrictions?  Not very, says Hertzmark.

 

This January, Britain’s wind turbines (6 percent of total generating capacity after many billions of dollars invested) supplied virtually no power on most days. The wind tends not to blow when and where it’s already very cold.

 

The stars of the British winter power demand were natural gas turbines, which are 34 percent of capacity and supplied 40 percent of the power during the winter wind lull. But Britain’s North Sea natural gas is running out; the only likely new source would be natural gas piped from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Ouch.

 

“Wind cannot be relied upon to provide firm generation at full capacity coincident with peak demand.” warns Hertzmark. “Wind might be capable of contributing to the peak demand requirements at some times. However, this will rarely happen—and when it does, it will be for brief periods. For significant periods of time, no households will be served by the wind farms.”

 

Nor have either of the worlds “wind leaders”—Denmark and Germany—decommissioned any fossil fuel plants. The fossil generators are kept in “spinning reserve”—burning fossil fuels—to keep the lights on in the schools, factories, and hospitals when the wind dies.

 

Why build wind turbines at all?  Well, wind and solar were the only energy sources the Greens would endorse, probably because they’re so expensive and erratic that there’s no danger of anybody getting hooked on cheap power again. Denmark was also selling wind turbines to other countries, so they had to be demonstrated at home. Now China is making cheaper turbines. Who will buy?

 

The cost of the “free wind”? Projections are about 17 cents per kwh—far higher than other energy sources.  One of my neighbors has just invested $100,000 in a wind turbine. I think he’s wasted his money—and some of yours.

 

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