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—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—India is setting up its own climate research unit because it no longer trusts the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I’ve been predicting such a move for years—partly due to the IPCC’s biased science, but more because India simply cannot afford to curtail its desperately needed and energy-powered economic growth. India’s government’s stability depends on expanding prosperity for the all of its people. That means more energy, and over half of India’s electricity comes from coal.  

 

Carried to its extreme, the global warming scare would pressure India to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that feeds nearly half its population—and even slaughter its 200 million sacred cows, which daily produce huge amounts of the greenhouse gas methane. Either would cause widespread rioting.

 

The warming alarmists have predicted awful things for India unless fossil fuels are curbed, including submergence of its coastal lands, lack of water for irrigation, increased cyclone activity, and forced shifts in rice production that would threaten hunger for millions.

 

I predict the new Indian research unit will find that the IPCC’s data and conclusions have been deliberately and massively misleading and the scares wildly overstated, while actual temperature changes have been small and non-threatening. We recently finished the third sharp increase in global temperature since 1850, including one from 1860–1880, and another from 1910–1914. All ended in coolings, not runaway warmings.

 

Other emerging countries have been willing to let the Western societies sacrifice themselves to the IPCC’s man-made warming dogma—and even hoped for some of those big “carbon guilt payments” the West has talked about. But it’s clear now that the West won’t be making big carbon payments to the Third World.

 

The breaking point for India came when the IPCC’s 2007 report announced that India’s Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than the world’s other glaciers, and might be completely gone by 2035—or sooner. Worse, the report claimed that the billions of people who depend on Himalayan snowmelt would no longer get adequate drinking and irrigation water from the Indus and Ganges Rivers. That could have triggered a major refugee problem for neighboring countries, or beyond.

 

India didn’t believe it, and assigned their top glaciologist, V.K. Raina, to assemble a new assessment from satellite data and laborious on-site measurements. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh announced a few weeks ago that Raina and his teams had found the IPCC was wrong. “There is no conclusive scientific evidence to link global warming with what is happening in the Himalayan glaciers,” which Ramesh pointed out are at much higher altitudes than most of the world’s other glaciers. He added that though some glaciers are receding, they were doing so at a rate “not historically alarming.” He further noted that India’s rivers actually depend primarily on the monsoons. .

 

In a remarkable finding, the Raina report claims the Ganotri glacier, the main source of the River Ganges, actually receded faster before 1978, and is today “practically at a standstill.” Newspapers warned that the Siachin glacier in Kashmir had shrunk as much as 50 percent—but Raina reports that those claims are simply wrong, that the big glacier has “not shown any remarkable retreat in the last 50 years.” 

 

The IPCC Chairman, India-born Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed the Indian response as “voodoo science,” But the flimsy basis for the IPCC claim has now been revealed, and the IPCC has had to issue an apology. Since then, additional IPCC claims have been found to lack scientific support.

 

My prediction:  The Indian science panel will hasten the end for the IPCC’s once-dominant view of man-made climate change.

 

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—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

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Just as congress is set to tax fossil fuels out of the U.S. economy, the New York Times has reasserted its utterly foolish demand that we tear out existing hydroelectric dams—the dams that  provide most of our renewable energy in the form of water-generated electricity..

Hydroelectric dams produce 8.5 percent of our power, and it’s all carbon-free. That’s nearly five times the deliveries from our erratic solar panels and wind turbines. Now we’re supposed to tear out hydroelectric dams just as every other key energy source is ripped away by a rapacious congress? 

 

What in the name of glitzy/ditzy Manhattan is the former “national paper of record” trying to do to the American people?   

 

The Times anguished on July 7^th that we’ve only torn out “only” 430 of the nation’s evil river-killing dams. It specifically mentions tearing down four power dams on the lower Snake River. The reason?  The Times says that will “protect salmon on the West Coast.” 

 

Nonsense. Hasn’t Andrew Revkin, the Times’ science writer, heard yet about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation discovered in 1996? Salmon numbers dropped radically in the Columbia after 1977— as the salmon catch surged upward in the Gulf of Alaska. The ocean currents had redistributed the fish food in the open ocean, delivering the food species to different destinations in a 50–60 year cycle that shows up brilliantly in the salmon catch records of both fisheries. The PDO also impacts catches of halibut, sardines, anchovies and other fish Pacific-wide. The fish species weren’t in danger, though some of the fishermen’s livelihoods were.

 

The PDO is highly correlated with sea temperatures in the northern California Current, and linked with prevailing winter wind direction in the northern Pacific. Southeast winds are warming. Northeastern winds cool.

 

Mr. Revkin should be up on this, because the PDO has also dictated recent global temperatures; the Pacific is the planet’s largest heat sink. When the Pacific and Atlantic cycles are in sync, as they were from 1976–98, the earth’s temperatures soar.

 

What drives the cycles? Let’s take a wild guess that it might be the sun. The sunspots began predicting the 2007 global temperature decline eight years before it happened. Since 2007, world temperatures have lost 30 years worth of their previous warming, snowpacks have increased, and ski seasons have lengthened.

 

• June in Manhattan averaged 3.7 degrees cooler than the recent norm—the coldest average since 1958.¹
• Phoenix was 8.5 degrees below the recent norm.²
• New Zealand’s National Climate Center announced, “Temperature:  Lowest ever for May for many areas, colder than normal for all.³
• The satellite temperatures? “June 2009 saw another — albeit small — drop in the global average temperature anomaly, from +0.04 deg. C in May to 0.00 degrees C in June, with the coolest anomaly in the Southern Hemisphere.” ⁴  
• Global temperatures are down 0.74 degree C since Gore’ movie opened in 2006. ⁵

 

The PDO fell from 1890–1924, rose from 1925–1946, fell from 1947–1976, and rose strongly from 1976–1999. Global temperatures followed the shifts. Both the PDO and the Columbia salmon have been stuttering since 1999, but NASA’s Jason satellite confirmed last year the PDO has now shifted cool. These short-term shifts are superimposed on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles that run back at least a million years.

 

The planet has been through all this before—without any cap-and-tax penalties on human endeavor.

 

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

 

Sources:

 

1. National Weather Service, July 8, 2004.www. forecast.weather.gov.

 

2. National Weather Service, July 1, www. forecast.weather.gov.

 

3. New Zealand National Climate Center, press release, June 2.

 

4. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama/Huntsville, drroyspencer.com

 

5.  Roy Spencer, University of Alabama/Huntsville, drroyspencer.com