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—The Obama carbon taxes will cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and may permanently cripple our economy. They’re meant to “save the planet” from excess greenhouse gases—but new evidence from tropical rain patterns seems to further refute the claims that recent global warming has been man-made.

 

Satellite photos show southern areas of the Sahara Desert have been greening over the past 15–20 years—confounding the climate models’ predictions that global warming would massively expand the deserts. Farouk al-Baz of Boston University told the BBC World Service, “The desert expands and shrinks in relation to the amount of energy that is received . . . from the sun . . .  over many thousands of years.”

 

We know the Sahara was much wetter 10,000 years ago when Stone Age hunters drew pictures of hippos and crocodiles on Saharan cave walls while Kenya was left dryer. The Sahara was also was wetter during the Roman Warming (200 BC to 800 AD) when the Romans imported huge amounts of wheat from the then well-watered fields in North Africa.

 

Out in the Central Pacific, chemical oceanographer Julian Sachs from the University of Washington was recently examining sediments under a fresh-water lake on a coral atoll near the equator. Suddenly, the layers of brown, coffee-colored mud gave way to a layer of strawberry jam-colored mud. He knew immediately it had been created by cyanobacteria that only live in super-salty water. That meant the atoll, which currently gets heavy tropical rains, had once been much drier.

 

“We knew right then that there had to have been a massive change in the climate regime,” said Sachs. Carbon dated it to the 17^th century, which meant the massive tropical rain belts hovered right near the equator during the 1600s, Sachs reports in Nature Geoscience. It was the depths of the Little Ice Age, with a sun one-tenth  as active as today’s. The team found similar evidence on other equatorial islands, including the Galapagos and Palau in the Philippine Sea.

 

More recently, says Sachs, the tropical rain band has moved northward about 300 miles.

 “If the Intertropical Convergence Zone was 550 km south of the present position as recently as 1630,” says Sachs, “it must have migrated northward just less than a mile a year.”  If that continues, he expects it to be 75 miles further north by the end of the century—as the Modern Warming continues for another century or four.    

 

Patrick Nunn of the University of the South Pacific in Fiji has already documented the Pacific beginnings of the Little Ice Age about 1300 and says it marked a radical shift from times of plenty to times of famine throughout the Pacific.

 

The global warmings have been the good times for humans; that’s the historic pattern of the 1500-year solar-linked Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycle. The warm phase of the cycle elevates temperatures in the Arctic by as much as 6 degrees C, and in the temperate regions by 1-3 degrees C. Temperatures at the equator don’t change much, but the tropical rain belts shift the deserts and wet spots.

 

The tropical rainfall patterns certainly rank as a key piece of evidence on whether the recent high world temperatures are being driven to dangerous levels by fossil fuels, or are part of the natural, moderate solar-linked cycle.

 

With the planet now cooling, we have time to learn more—before we pay trillions of dollars to eliminate fossil fuels and then find the effort was useless.  

 

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:

 

Southern Sahara greening:  Ayisha Yahya, “Are the deserts getting greener?”, BBC News, July 16, 2009;  Ker Than, “Deserts Might Grow as Tropics Expand,” LiveScience, Fox News.com, May 25, 2006.

Sahara Lush and Populated:  Bjorn Carey, “Sahara Desert was Lush and Populated Only Temporarily,” LiveScience, Fox News.com, July 24, 2006.: 

On the shifting tropical rainbelts in the Pacific: Emily Sohn, “Shifting Rains Impact Pacific Islands.” Discovery News, July 10, 2009; “Tropical Rainfall Moving North,” LiveScience, Fox News.com,  July 2, 2009;  Patrick Nunn, et al., “Times of Plenty, Times of Less: Last-Millennium Societal Disruption in the Pacific Basin,” Human Ecology , Jan 5, 2007.

 

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