Tiree. Does it really deserve the world’s largest off shore windfarm?
The renewable energy industry is helping to destroy the UK economy and drive up unemployment says a new report. For every one of David Cameron’s green jobs created in the renewable energy sector (mainly solar and wind), another 3.7 jobs are being lost in the real economy, says the independent study by Verso Economics. In total, measurable policies to promote renewable energy cost £1.4 billion in the UK and £168 million in Scotland in 2009/10. But this doesn’t take into account the additional economic damage inflicted by the erection of enormous, bird-chopping monstrosities all over some of Britain’s most attractive tourist spots including, for example, the hitherto unspoilt island of Tiree.(H/T Michael Daly)
Still, its not all bad news. Until really quite recently, it was only lonely voices like Christopher Booker’s which were prepared to speak out against the great Wind Farm scam (and related Climate Cons). Now, as the Verso Economics report shows, more and more people are waking up to the horrendous economic and environmental damage being done in the name of combatting AGW/climate change/climate disruption/fill in fashionable new phrase here.
Booker lays out the facts yet again in a storming piece in the Daily Mail entitled Why the £250 billion wind farm industry could be the greatest scam of our age. The real villains of the piece, he argues, are our political classes Tories, Labour and Lib Dems alike who are completely out of touch with their increasingly sceptical electorate.
. Our Government has embarked on one of the most reckless gambles in our political history: the idea that we can look to the vagaries of the wind to provide nearly a third of the electricity we need to keep our economy running, well over 90 per cent of which is still currently supplied by coal, gas and nuclear power.
It is true that this target of raising the contribution made by wind by more than ten times in the next nine years was set by the EU.
But it is no good blaming Brussels for such an absurdly ambitious target, because no one was keener to adopt it than our own politicians, led first by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband and now by David Cameron and the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.
To meet this target, our Government wants to see us spend £100billion on building 10,000 more turbines, plus another £40billion on connecting them all up to the grid.
According to the electricity industry, we will then need to spend another £100billion on those conventional power stations to provide back-up — all of which adds up to £240billion by 2020, or just over £1,000 a year for every household in the land.
And for this our politicians are quite happy to see our countryside and the seas around our coasts smothered in vast arrays of giant industrial machines, all to produce an amount of electricity that could be provided by conventional power stations at a tenth of the cost.
When pressed on this, politicians talk airily of all the Green jobs which will ensue from investment (ie massive taxpayer subsidy) in renewables and of all the energy security which will result. The chutzpah required to come out with this guff is astonishing given that there is not a scintilla of real-world evidence to back up these claims. We already know that wind and solar power have proved a disaster in Germany, Denmark and Spain (where Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez calculated that for every green job the country had destroyed 2.2 jobs in the real economy). We also know that because of the unreliability of wind power, it has to be permanently backed up by conventional power. And we also know that energy security is no longer the problem its cracked up to be because of the shale gas revolution, which will provide us all with cheap, abundant energy for the next 250 years, some of it from as close to home as Blackpool.
Shale gas, as Andrew Orlowski notes here, has everything going for it:
No technology in the world is as disruptive as shale gas right now. Shale disrupts the conventional gas and oil businesses by decoupling the price of natural gas from the price of oil. It disrupts the petroleum industry by providing a cheap alternative to petrol: UPS is putting liquified natural gas-powered trucks into its fleet. It disrupts both by allowing new entrants into the field, which upsets the existing cartels, and state monopolies.
It disrupts the nuclear industry by providing energy buyers with a supply thats cheap and reliable – with no subsidies required. Politically, shale frees much of Europe from a dependence on Russias gas production. It also disrupts the environmental movement in several ways, making the high subsidies that investors demand to build ecologically correct renewable energy, such as wind and solar, hard to justify. An economy dependent on gas, rather than coal, cannot but help but lower its carbon footprint.
With so many vested interests upset by shale, no wonder its so popular!
Yet the economic benefits of an abundance of cheaper energy cant be overstressed: cheaper manufactured goods, energy independence, and an end to the obscenity of fuel poverty, where the poorest freeze – and pay to subsidise solar panels on the roofs of the wealthy. There are 5.5m UK households today living in fuel poverty – and thanks to carbon emissions targets and renewables commitments, the average household will have to pay £300 extra every year to 2020.
Which of course, Orlowski goes on, is why eco-nut politicians like the dreadful Chris Huhe are so determined to stamp on it.
But even if the politicians don’t understand the situation, the markets do.
Heres a report from Bloomberg, for example, on the sudden end of the UK solar gold rush:
Britain is moving faster than any other European country to contain a surge in solar power and prevent the boom-and-bust seen in Spain and predicted for the Czech Republic. The risk is scaring off the investors who would create the “green jobs” Prime Minister David Cameron is seeking to revive the economy.
“It’s going to completely kill the market,” said Tim German, renewable energy manager for the local government in Cornwall at the U.K.’s southwest tip. “Investors are starting to get cold feet.”
Why is this happening? Because the British government has belatedly come to realise what the Spanish government had already discovered months ago: that the renewables industry (being economically worthless in its own right) is only sustainable (tee hee) through massive government subsidy known as feed-in tariffs. These subsidies are so costly to the Exchequer and therefore to the taxpayer that they not only wreak enormous damage on the economy but prove extremely unpopular with voters.
When it comes to saving Mother Gaia and being able to feed and clothe their kids, people can very suddenly become very pragmatic about the threat of Man Made Global Warming. We’ve just seen a delicious example of this in Ireland which has been playing the green energy scam game more enthusiastically than perhaps any other country in the world whose Green party has been utterly destroyed in the recent elections.
I also like to think of it as another important sign of our fast-changing times that Watts Up With That? has won the 2011 Bloggie award for Best Science Blog. Thoroughly deserved of course, but can you imagine this happening even two years ago: an avowedly AGW sceptical blog being lionised in this way? I cant. The AGW industry is collapsing faster than Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. All those of you who have done your bit in fighting the great climate wars, I salute you!
Related posts:
- Green jobs? Wot green jobs? (pt 242)
- ‘Global warming’: time to get angry
- What the Chinese really think of ‘Man Made Global Warming’.
- Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?
46 thoughts on “The real cost of ‘global warming’”
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Take a look at the 520,000 year long Vostok ice-core record. What it shows is Earths temperature and CO2 record. What that shows is temperature rise leads to CO2 rise, with an 800 year lag to CO2 rising.
So Temp is the horse, and CO2 is a cart. Cause and effect, got it?
Now we come to the theory of CO2 which is CO2 rise and CAUSE Temp rise (ie. putting the cart before the horse). But the Vostok record shows high CO2 levels, even above todays 380ppm has NO EFFECT on earths Temp. Instead Earths Tempt continues to decline through high CO2 peaks.
So forget your CO2 theory, earth already has proven it to be total bollocks.
So hwo about you go have a lookey at it, learn something even a 12 year old can follow and inform your AGW believers to STFU
I am getting so bored of reading the same old stuff …
ALL DENIALIST RED-HERRINGS BEBUNKED HERE FOR FREE:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html
For goodness sake, wake up!
However, as I said to Nige Cook yesterday, “You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”
While you are waiting for climate change to become incontivertable, why don’t you take up smoking? After all, if you believe those that tell you it is not the burning of fossil fuels over the last 200 years that is the problem, you must surely also accept that smoking does not cause lung cancer….
“You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”The “multifarious” and “small number of extremely influential scientists” are the same people.
Totally agree with you its like he’s frightened of being ignored.Did you see his pathetic performance on the Horizon program, when presented with facts he just resorts to the same tired old rants that were left behind in the 1970’s
It seems that you are incapable of being succinct and to the point (and have a penchant for fitting the word “Nazi” into just about every post). However, that is all I have ever tried to be (i.e. succinct rather than a Nazi)!
I believe that the New Scientist website contains a comprehensive debunking of all your pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, including claiming that water vapour (which has always been a transient component of the atmosphere) is more important GHG than the CO2 (which is well on the way to being double pre-industrial levels).
When presented with just the CO2 data for the last 500,000 years, even my 15-yr old son could recognise that the the only thing that is “new” or “different” (and therefore must be prime suspect for causation) is the release of fossilised carbon in the last 200 yrs.
If the truth hurts; I suggest that you stop lying to yourself!
4. The most prolific period of life on earth was the Cambrian explosion beginning 545 million, which (according to GEOCARB 1.0) led to a CO2 abundance over 15 times higher than today 460 million years ago than it is now, with mean global temperature was 7 Celsius higher than now. Even just 100 million years ago (nothing in the 4.5 billion years long history of this planet), there were no continuous ice caps at the poles (just winter snow): all the ice melted in the summer at the poles, and deciduous rain forests existed within 1,000 km of the poles. This was opposed by the cooling from the interruption to air flow by the Alps, which arose from the result of a collision beginning 120 million years ago between Africa and Eurasia, and beginning 50 million years ago, the rise of the Himalayas and Tibet due to the collision of the plates of India and Eurasia cooled the whole planet by strengthening the monsoon system in southern Asia.
5. Mars is experiencing natural “global warming” without any human intervention:
“… for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars’ south pole have shrunk from the previous year’s size, suggesting a climate change in progress.”
– NASA, September 20, 2005: Orbiter’s Long Life Helps Scientists Track Changes on Mars.
6. If the mainstream H2O vapour positive-feedback doubling model was correct (amplifying CO2 temperature increases by a factor of two), then H2O vapour itself would have long since saturated the atmosphere made the temperature on Earth rise to boiling point. It can’t, because hot moist air rises to form clouds with a high albedo, that reflects sunlight away from Earth, cooling the planet and regulating climate: H2O opposes CO2, it doesn’t amplify it! The NASA scientist who discovered this resigned in protest when censored, and his associate, Dr. Miklos Zagoni, states: “Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases [water vapor], if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans.” They can prove it, too: the NOAA data on humidity in air shows a fall in H2O atmospheric water vapour (not the predicted rise!) between 1948 and 2008. H2O is 30 times more important than CO2 as a “greenhouse gas” so the small fall in H2O vapour plus the increase in condensed H2O (cloud cover) offsets the effect of CO2 on temperature. The “greenhouse” gases are in stable equilibrium, with H2O falling as CO2 and CH4 increase, and vice-versa! This is an example of Le Châtelier’s principle of disturbed equilibria.
7. CO2 absorbing rainforests can’t spread (migrate) very quickly, so they can be easily killed off by temperature fall rates which CO2 emitting animals easily survive by migration of CO2 emitting animals. This proved mechanism increases the atmospheric CO2 level in response to a change in temperature in the geological record. Hence, atmospheric levels of CO2 in geological history have not been driving temperature, but just responding to it. Because of the amazing speed at which tropical vegetation can grow in hot, humid, conditions, a rise in temperature increases CO2 absorbing rainforests faster than animals can proliferate, causing a fall in atmospheric CO2 levels. Therefore, the fossil record correlation between CO2 and temperature is not due to CO2 driving temperature, but is due to temperature driving CO2 changes!
“How many countries will have to be flooded by rising sea levels? How much desertification will it take? What percentage loss in crop yields? How much consequential migration? How many wars started over access to food or water?” – Martin Lack
My experience with climate change liars began with “nuclear winter”, hyped in 1983, which claimed that cold weather would reduce the number of frost-free days for farming in Canada and some Northern American states. Now if you have global warming instead of “nuclear winter”, you don’t need Einstein to tell you that warming will allow farming to be extended to previously permafrost areas, “you gain some, you lose some”. People can adapt to global warming by moving farm areas closer to the poles. However, the warming rate is too slow. CO2 isn’t having a long-term effect, because it’s been proven by the censored NASA climate scientists that H2O cloud cover increases oppose CO2, preventing positive feedback from water vapour. So there isn’t a problem, but if there were a problem, the solution wouldn’t be to try to cut CO2 emissions, just to live with it. Cutting annual CO2 emissions just slows down the time taken to pump CO2 into the atmosphere; and it’s cost inefficient even if CO2 was the problem (it isn’t).
“In a special message to Congress in February 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson noted: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” ” – Martin Lack
Actually, Edward Teller in 1958 was using using the CO2 argument against fossil fuels. See Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter, Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (Criterion Books, New York, 1958), page 167:
“If we continue to consume [fossil] fuel at an increasing rate, however, it appears probable that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will become high enough to raise the average temperature of the earth by a few degrees. If this were to happen, the ice caps would melt and the general level of the oceans would rise. Coastal cities like New York and Seattle might be innundated. Thus the industrial revolution using ordinary chemical fuel could be forced to end … However, it might still be possible to use nuclear fuel.”
Like Teller’s dismissal of Feynman’s path integrals in 1948, he was wrong. I’m sure you’ll also find a hot air “warning” in Jeremiah, Dante, Nostradamus, and every “the end is nigh” opinion piece in the Guardian since its inception in 1821. Scare-mongering doesn’t count as science, no matter what it’s history, no matter how many people supported eugenics, how famous they were, what prizes they received, how wealthy they were, etc. In science, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. That’s what makes science different from subjective horseshit.
Since you mentioned SO2, what ever happened to the global disaster that was ‘acid rain’?
Was the problem that acid rain lacked longevity. As the theory of acid rain would result in fairly immediate, and measurable consequences; whereas AGW can go on for ever… “are we there yet?… are we there yet?… are we there yet?”
You’re still assuming that the temperature proxies, “Mike’s Nature trick” of gluing false tree-ring proxies to false weather station data post-1960 (mostly downwind of expanding cities, causing temperature rises by direct heat pollution from central heating, not CO2!), is true. All this data is faked statistics. Tree rings are no temperature proxy because tree growth is provably affected by sunlight/cloud-cover (not the same thing as air temperature!). Tree ring data doesn’t correlate with temperature due, as you suggest to global dimming from sulphur dioxide, much of which comes from natural volcanic pollution, not industry.
But there is also a cloud cover effect from extra H2O evaporating from slightly warmed oceans, increasing Earth’s albedo. This has a natural cooling effect, and is why Earth is not a greenhouse. To exaggerate this mechanism: if the sun boils the oceans, clouds of steam form which stop the sunlight reaching the oceans. Thus, Earth regulates its temperature automatically, once the oceans heat very slightly.
Satellite temperature data is also all fake, because it is biased. It can at best only measure surface temperatures in areas not covered with clouds, which is a biased sample because cloud cover has been increasing since 1948 as NOAA data on humidity imply. So you need to know the average temperature under the cloudy skies, and a sensitive measure of exactly how the average cloud cover of the Earth has varied, to get a correct overall average temperature. Cloud cover traditionally was recorded using a subjective glance at the sky and a simple fraction, e.g. 1/4 of sky covered or 1/3rd, which isn’t very accurate.
However, there is data on the lack of H2O feedback: http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/new.gif This data proves that water vapour hasn’t been increasing with CO2 emissions! Atmospheric H2O has fallen by 1% since 1946, while CO2 has risen. Since 1 kg of H2O as vapour in the atmosphere (not as condensed cloud droplets!) absorbs 30 times as much solar radiation energy as 1 kg of CO2, it follows that the 1% fall in H2O vapour is equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2 “greenhouse” gas equivalent! This is countering global warming, and NASA banned its researcher Dr Ferenc Miskolczi who discovered this from publishing it! IPCC computer models still assume falsely that H2O amplifies, rather than opposes, CO2.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/08/the-global-cooling-myth-dies-again/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/18/how-to-handle-climate-cha_n_467671.htmlYou conveniently forget that CH4 is also >20 times more potent as a GHG than CO2 and, therefore, that the ongoing thawing of the permafrost (i.e another positive feedback mechanism) is far more significant than any negative feedback caused by any reduction in average humidity.
The NOAA data show a decrease in H2O vapour by 0.8% since 1958, equivalent to a 30×0.8 = 24% (from 30 x 0.8%) decrease in CO2. Therefore, the H2O vapour decrease is cancelling out the CO2 rise. Your denialism of the H2O fall can’t last forever!
http://delingpoleworld/blog/the-real-cost-of-global-warming-1329/comment-page-1/#comment-10420
Although unable to edit this post I accept that you did mention methane.
See the video of Dr Miklos Zagoni (an Hungarian government adviser) explaining NASA contractor Dr Ferenc Miskolczi discovery of how H2O prevents further global warming: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/ferenc-miskolczi%e2%80%99s-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-c02-cannot-cause-any-more-global-warming/
The problem with both Dr Zagoni and Miskolczi is technical obfuscation. They take a crystal clear mechanism supported by NOAA data, but then built a spurious set of calculations based on an idealized model. Critics then ignore the mechanism and the data and simply dispute details the idealized (wrong) model, so the public never hear the facts!
1. CO2 causes a slight warming of the surface waters in the oceans up to 1997 AD.
2. The slight warming increases H2O evaporation slightly.
3. The extra humid sea level air caused by H2O evaporation absorbs sunlight radiation. (Everybody agrees up to this point!)
4. The sunlight-absorbing humid air is heated by the sunlight it absorbs, and hot air always rises due to bouyancy. Since the temperature and pressure fall with altitude, the humid air which rise like a hot air balloon expands and condenses to form extra cloud cover, which has a high albedo and reflects back more sunlight into space, cooling the Earth. Thus, H2O is a negative-feedback mechanism, and the only reason why IPCC models say the opposite (positive feedback from H2O) is that they omit the bouyancy of hot air!
In other words, the fact heated air rises disproves current global warming models, which ignore this fact! In science, if you find a gross error in a model and don’t correct it, you know the model is defective. 62% of the Earth’s skies are covered by clouds, and this percentage is a function of CO2. Inject more CO2, and cloud cover increases, regulating temperature. This negative-feedback mechanism was censored from publication by NASA.
1. The ” trick” referred t in the UEA emails was a standard method of correcting two sets of data that do not fit together even when you know they should.
2. We are not reliant on tree ring/growth data anymore and, as the New Scientist points out, the evidence that things are now warming more rapidly than ever (since 1850) are all around us (i.e. the shifting seasons etc).
3. There is no significant difference between recent land-based and satellite-based temperature data.As I said to JimmyGiro, if the truth hurts then I suggest you stop lying to yourself (or listening to liars).