climate

Useless Wind Power

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Alan Moran on the failure of green power in last week’s heatwave:


AEMO data shows that during heat wave conditions in the five days to 18 January this year, wind actually contributed 3 per cent of electricity supply across the Australian National Electricity Market.  Nobody knows the contribution of roof top solar but it could not conceivably have been more than one per cent.

Overall, wind facilities amount to 3,300 megawatts of capacity, somewhat less than the Loy Yang brown coal power stations in Victoria or Macquarie Generation’s black coal facilities in the Hunter Valley.  Windmills produced at an average of 23 per cent of their capacity during the January heat wave.  This was below their year-long average of about 30 per cent because the hot spell, as is often the case, was characterised by still air…

The below par performance of windmills in high demand periods means they not only require a subsidy but are also less valuable than other plant because their availability is reduced when they are most needed and when the price is highest… Indeed, during the recent heat wave, wind power earned an average of $123 per megawatt hour in Victoria and $182 in South Australia while the average price was respectively $209 and $285 in the two states.

Investments in wind and other subsidised electricity generation, according to the renewable energy lobby group the Clean Energy Council, has been $18.5 billion.  By contrast, the market value of comparable generating capacity in Macquarie Generation coal plants is said to be only $2 billion and a brand new brown coal plant of 3,300 megawatt capacity would cost less than $10 billion.

Wind aficionados claim that such costings do not take into account that wind is free whereas fossil fuel plants have to pay for their energy. But that is also untrue.  Wind plant maintenance is about $12 per megawatt hour which is more than the fuel plus maintenance costs of a Victorian brown coal power station.

 

The End of Science

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When I was younger, I loved science. I think it was because of the amazing knowledge that the disciplined examination of the world produced- quantum physics, chemistry and so on.

But something happened along the way. Sure, chemists kept doing chemistry and physicists kept on producing weirder and weirder insights in to the universe. But science was being hijacked by causes and new “disciplines” sprang up with non-scientific names and practices, usually with words such as environmental, social or sustainable tacked onto the title.

Science became politicised and, with the clmate catastrophe, turned into a religion. Now there are certain things which may not be said, even if they are true. Censored science is anti-science.

So we come to this, from Jo Nova:

Science paper doubts IPCC, so whole journal gets terminated!

…

In extraordinary news, the scientific journal Pattern Recognition in Physics has been unexpectedly terminated, a “drastic decision” taken just ten months after it started.

The publisher appears to be shocked that in a recent special issue the scientists expressed doubt about the accelerated warming predicted by the IPCC. For the crime of not bowing before the sacred tabernacle, apparently the publishers suddenly felt the need to distance themselves, and in the most over-the-top way. The reasons they gave had nothing to do with the data, the logic, and they cite no errors. There can be no mistake, this is about enforcing a permitted line of thought.

I must say, it’s a brilliant (if a tad expensive) way to draw attention to a scientific paper. It’s the Barbara-Streisland moment in science. Forget “withdrawn”, forget “retracted”, the new line in the sand is to write a paper so hot they have to terminate the whole journal! Skeptics could hardly come up with a more electric publicity campaign.

Naturally, as with all good Barbara-Streisland-moves intended to suppress information, as soon as I heard, the first thing I did was to seek out and download copies of all the papers. Right now, people everywhere would be starting to do the same, curious to know what could be so unsayable. (See the links at the bottom).

In the official announcement the excuses are amazingly transparent. There is little attempt to cover up the reasons. The publisher pays the usual lip service saying science needs disputes and discussion of controversial topics. But some things are apparently too awful to contemplate — like pointing out how the high priests of the IPCC might be incorrect.

Read the full, disturbing story here

 

“97% of all scientists”

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A survey of American Meteorologists discovered that when you actually ask people what they think about the cause of climate change (as opposed to getting a bunch of activists to rank a bunch of scientific papers and guess the thoughts of the authors), the number of climate scientists who actually believe that climate change is caused by humans is not 97% but only 52%.

From wattsupwiththat.com

The 97% consensus myth – busted by a real survey

52percent_AMS-vs-97percent_SkS

We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots. As has been previously pointed out on WUWT, when you look at the methodology used to reach that number, the veracity of the result falls apart, badly. You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. Essentially it was pal-review by an activist group with a strong bias towards a particular outcome as demonstrated by the name “the consensus project”.

In short, it was a lie of omission enabled by a “pea and thimble” switch Steve McIntyre so often points out about climate science.

Most people who read the headlines touted by the unquestioning press had no idea that this was a collection of Skeptical Science raters opinions rather than the authors assessment of their own work. Readers of news stories had no idea they’d been lied to by John Cook et al².

So, while we’ll be fighting this lie for years, one very important bit of truth has emerged that will help put it into its proper place of propaganda, rather than science. A recent real survey conducted of American Meteorological Society members has blown Cook’s propaganda paper right out of the water.

REad the rest of the article here

Meanwhile in the real world

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While the Labor Party and the Greens hang desperately to the dream of emissions trading as the cure for climate change, and they keep spreading the lie that the rest of the world is moving that way, in the real world things are very different.

Jo Nova, Australian scientist, has long advocated the maim “follow the money” when looking at the climate change advocates. Now the money is leaving the room.

London Bankers abandon trading — 70% of jobs gone: “it’s over” says Executive

At least someone once thought London was the home of carbon finance. Now, not so much.  According to the Financial Times, JP Morgan has scaled down their carbon trading team, Morgan Stanley traders are now “part time”,  Barclays sold theirs last year, Deutsche Bank closed the office, and UBS shut its climate change advisory panel. Then there is a slew of smaller fish, EcoSecurities, Camco Clean Energy, Nedbank, Sindacatum, and TFS Green.

[Financial Times] At least 10 London banks have scaled back or closed their carbon trading desks amid turmoil in the European emissions trading scheme.

The fledgling market was once seen as a promising growth area, with the City of London Corporation predicting in 2006 that London would become the leading provider of services to the “mushrooming” sector.

But the number of City workers employed on carbon desks has fallen by 70 per cent in the past four years, according to Anthony Hobley, president of the Climate Markets & Investors Association.

Things are dire:

“…as a stand alone business it is basically over,” said an executive who oversees European energy trading at one large bank.

Read the full story here (Paywall)

The State of the EU market is so sick the World Bank canceled the report.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the money is leaving the room…