Palin On Energy – June 2008

In case you haven’t seen/heard her yet, this was on Glenn Beck – from start of June, 2008 (Hang in there; Governor Palin at 4:22):

Breath of fresh air! Maybe gasoline won’t cost $20/gallon in 2010 after all!

Assault on Reason, by Expert Al Gore

After a year of the most abrupt cooling ever observed on Earth; while carbon dioxide has continued to increase, The Assault on Reason by Al Gore becomes increasingly incredible, if that is possible. Magnetic activity on the Sun increasingly emulates the period prior to the Dalton Minimum; we are now observing long periods free of sunspots, and other important magnetic indications (Average Geomagnetic Planetary Index (Ap)) run strongly parallel (Anthony Watts, Sun poised to make history with first spotless month since 1913)

Worth re-reading: “If Al Gore were truly concerned about carbon dioxide, he would be clamoring for nuclear power plants . . . Al Gore, himself, has already accumulated astonishing personal wealth during his campaign against world energy technology and is now a principal in a new corporation being formed to profit from public fear of global warming.”

The Virtues of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

by Dr. Arthur Robinson Human Events January 4, 2008

(article includes 61 comments)

Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” includes some very remarkable revelations including:

1. A “computer calculated” temperature prediction curve with predictions beginning in 1938 — when neither Al Gore nor the computer had yet been invented.

2. Photos of South Sea islanders being washed from their islands by rising seas — sea level having risen 3 inches during the past 50 years.

3. Drawings of species driven to extinction by human use of hydrocarbons — including the Wooly Mammoth, which has been gone from the Earth for thousands of years.

4. A little girl’s ice cream cone melting before she can eat it — as a result of the current 0.5 degree centigrade per century increase in temperature.

5. 650,000 years of Earth temperature fluctuations, including 6 ice ages – all caused, according to Al Gore, by carbon dioxide fluctuations of entirely unknown origins.

Al Gore’s other popular offering is his book appropriately entitled The Assault on Reason — a subject for which he obviously has readily demonstrated expertise.

George Washington was at Valley Forge during the coldest period in 1,500 years, with Earth average temperatures dipping as low as 1 degree centigrade below the 3,000-year average. Since then, temperatures have gradually recovered. If the current rate of increase continues, about 2 centuries from now the temperature of the Earth will be back to that of the medieval period 1,000 years ago — when Greenland was green and warmer weather brought increased growing seasons and general rises in comfort and prosperity in many cooler climates.

Meanwhile, in the United States, rainfall is increasing, tornados are becoming less frequent, glaciers have been receding for 200 years — back to their more normal average lengths, and hurricane frequency and severity has been unchanged for the past century.

Standing timber in U.S. forests has, however, increased by 40% since 1950; 2,000-year-old pine trees are growing faster; and animal and plant quantity and diversity are sharply increasing. This is truly alarming! If current trends continue, we will be overrun by squirrels, deer, and foxes and fighting for our lives against aggressively growing orange and apple trees. A dire prediction was even published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — I am not making this up — warning that poison ivy is also growing faster.

The three most important substances that make life possible are water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. The primary structural and functional element in all living things is carbon. All carbon in protein, fat, carbohydrate, and the other organic molecules in living things is derived from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Without atmospheric carbon dioxide, life as we know it would not be possible. Plants inhale carbon dioxide and are thereby fertilized. When atmospheric carbon dioxide increases — as it has by about 30% during the past century, plant life and the animal life that thrives upon it are also increased.

The annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide attributable to human activities — primarily the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — is about 1 part in 10,000 of that contained in the oceans and biosphere — a contribution of ultimately negligible consequence. Since, however, this human-released carbon must travel through the atmosphere to reach the ocean and biotic reservoirs, human use, while it continues, has caused a transient rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from about 0.03% to about 0.04% of atmospheric molecules. The primary environmental result of this rise is plant fertilization. We are moving carbon from below ground into the atmosphere, where it is available to produce more plants and animals — a wonderful and unexpected gift from the industrial revolution.

The Earth’s atmosphere and surface are warmed by solar radiation; the greenhouse effect — primarily caused by atmospheric water vapor; and other less-understood phenomena. Carbon dioxide and methane are also greenhouse gases, but their physical properties render their greenhouse effects very weak. Neither warms the Earth significantly, and no greenhouse warming caused by these two substances has ever been unequivocally observed. The warming and cooling of the Earth is correlated most closely with fluctuations in solar activity and is entirely uncorrelated with human hydrocarbon use.

This has not, however, troubled Al Gore, the United Nations, and their enviro retainers, who are regaling the body politic with unverified computer projections that purport to predict the weather centuries in the future. These computer models cannot predict the weather next week, nor can they even “predict” the weather last year. In order to make the models conform at least somewhat to past temperature trends, their handlers have introduced 6 and even 7 adjustable parameters into their calculations. As Enrico Fermi famously remarked when quoting his friend, the great mathematician and computer pioneer John von Neumann, “with 3 parameters I can fit an elephant and with 4, I can make him wiggle his trunk.”

Why are these people doing this? Why has Al Gore positioned himself to become a historical laughing stock, and why have a few hundred United Nations climate change-funded “scientists” joined them? The reason surely is not global warming. If they truly were alarmed as they say about imminent climatic peril, they would be clamoring for the Penner-Teller solution. These scientists have shown that slight injections of sun-blocking particulates into the upper atmosphere would immediately erase all Earth warming of the past 200 years. Teller estimated the cost to achieve this cooler temperature at about $1 billion. A similar additional amount would probably be required annually to maintain the cooling.

If Al Gore were truly alarmed about hydrocarbon use, he would be clamoring for nuclear power plants. The construction of just 50 nuclear installations similar to that partially completed at Palo Verde near Phoenix would erase most of the U.S. carbon dioxide output – and would also erase most of the U.S. trade deficit at the same time. Yet, while The Wall Street Journal recently counted 381 nuclear power plants in various stages of planning or construction around the world — but none being constructed in the United States, Al Gore and his retainers actually oppose nuclear power.

So, why are they doing this? In the words of Indiana Jones — “fortune and glory, kid, fortune and glory” — paraphrase that “money and power, madam, money and power.” Al Gore, himself, has already accumulated astonishing personal wealth during his campaign against world energy technology and is now a principal in a new corporation being formed to profit from public fear of global warming. Meanwhile, United Nations bureaucrats are mesmerized by the prospect of taxing and rationing world energy supplies — a position of virtually unlimited wealth and power that would give them life-and-death control over both world technology and the human race.

And, why do we prefer that Al Gore and his friends not succeed? One reason is that, in the poorer countries of the world, billions of people are using technology to lift themselves from poverty and to gain some of the technological blessings that Americans now enjoy. These people need inexpensive, relatively low technology energy that can, with current methods, only be practically derived from hydrocarbons. World hydrocarbon rationing would deprive them of this energy, destroy their dreams, and cause them to slip backwards into suffering, poverty, and death.

Simultaneously, Americans can only maintain and extend their own technology and prosperity with inexpensive energy — available now in practical quantities only from hydrocarbon and nuclear sources. Moreover, only people who are prosperous can afford the cost of true environmentalism.

Most people agree that increased quality, quantity, and length of human life and decreased human suffering are worthwhile goals. These goals are best reached by technological advance, and inexpensive energy is the currency of technological progress. The myth of human-caused global warming currently threatens these goals and that technological advance. This is the truth — inconvenient as it may be to the self-centered aspirations of Al Gore and his United Nations friends.

More information and proof can be found here.

Oil Works, Wind Turbines Don’t

Mother nature dumps 63 times more oil into the ocean than does drilling and extraction, through natural seepage. The Santa Barbara channel seepage is not exceptional, apparently. Seepage of oil into the ocean and U.S. coastal waters is widespread, even typical.

Oil in ocean - a natural phenomonon

See “Mother Nature, the biggest oil polluter on Earth”
Some documentation here: CRS REport for Congress, Oil Spills in U.S. Coastal Waters

The time to switch to solar energy, or to wind power, not only is not today; it may be never. The alternatives to oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy so often cited as if they are silver bullets in the battle to prevent imaginary global warming simply are not economically viable, on any scale.

In this abortive Massachussetts attempt (below) to prevent imaginary global warming, 19 turbines produced only 27% of planned energy. Other turbines produced only 17% and 15% of planned output, according to the Massachussetts Technology Collaborative.

On the other hand, if T. Boon Pickens wants to build us a half-trillion dollar transmission system, he should get started. But he doesn’t, because he knows it cannot pay.

The practical and proven solution is build more nuclear plants, drill more oil and more natural gas. Convert coal to gas; then make hydrogen fuel. But we better do it quickly. We have no guarantee that Earth is not about to cool off by more than 5 degrees Farenheit; in fact, the climate gives every indication of doing exactly that.

No rebate, no wind turbines on rooftops at Commons (H/T: Tom Nelson)

. . . according to the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, the agency that oversees the state’s major alternative energy rebate programs, the small wind initiative was canceled because the turbines it has funded are producing far less energy than originally estimated.

An MTC-sponsored study released earlier this summer found that the average energy production of 19 small turbines reviewed was only 27 percent of what the installers had projected. The actual production for the 19 turbines, which received nearly $600,000 in public funding, ranged between 2 and 59 percent of the estimates.

A $75,663 turbine at Falmouth Academy that received $47,500 in state money, for example, has produced only 17 percent of the projected energy in the year since its installation. Another, smaller device in Bourne is producing only 15 percent of the originally estimated energy.

The MTC blamed the underperformance generally on inaccurate information provided by manufacturers and poor siting of the turbines, as well as inaccurate wind speed estimates and inefficiencies in wiring and other equipment.

The MTC grants are generally considered to be critical to the financial viability of wind turbines and other alternative energy projects.

Megan Amsler, executive director of the Falmouth-based Cape and Islands Self-Reliance Corporation, who spoke out against roof-mounted wind turbines before the Mashpee Planning Board, said the cause of the underperformance of many of the devices is self-evident. If the blades are not high enough above nearby obstructions, preferably at least 30 feet above the tallest object within a 500 foot radius, the wind becomes muddled and the turbines will not work, she said. The higher the turbine, the better it will perform, she said.

She said roof-mounted turbines are not high enough to be effective.

She pointed to a study by a British firm that found that some turbines in poorly sited locations are producing so little electricity that the energy draw of the electricity inverter, which changes the direct current electricity generated by the turbines into alternating current usable by homes and businesses, is greater than the energy captured by the turbine.

4 Sources Admit Fastest Temp Change in History – DOWN

Trust me, this is not good news. If global temperatures continue down at the present rate, humans will need vastly more energy and more food – just as central government planners have determined to reduce your energy supply by making energy vastly more expensive.

That’s right. In Senate Bill S. 2191 (See The Lieberman-Warner Cap and Trade Bill: Quick Summary and Analysis) uninformed persons propose to drastically increase the cost of your energy, and even your food; as the Earth cools at the fastest rate ever observed. This is not a good idea right now; but it never was anyway. No data has ever been produced showing that anthropogenic carbon dioxide contributes to global warming. Every computer model based on this fallacious presumption has failed to predict climate or temperature. As carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up, temperature has gone down – at the fastest (up or down) rate ever observed.

Perhaps the most important collective action we can take, for the future of our children and for human inhabitants of Earth, is to STOP profoundly perverse legislative travesties such as S. 2191.

H/T: Moonbattery As Temperatures Cool, Global Warming Hype . . .

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling by Michael Asher, DailyTech.com

[note, added 8/31/08 at 17:20: the year referred to ended in February, 2008; I wish I had posted this at that time, but I didn’t – better late than never. Admittedly the rate moderated, however the precipitous drop deserves to be recognized for what it is.]

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let’s hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans — and most of the crops and animals we depend on — prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Secret To Wind Energy: Pay Twice!

Pristine Ecosystem Stirring Device

Americans can take great comfort in the fact that factories in China will require much less energy cost than American factories, because the Chinese factories will use fossil fuel.  Consider it a vacation if you’re unemployed. As American energy expert and Messiah Obama explained last week, China’s infrastucture is VASTLY superior to ours. China has no such energy experts (now that is an infrastructure feature we should seek to emulate)!

There is a Green Revolution off Germany’s coast; all that’s required is a price floor, DOUBLING THE PRICE OF ENERGY! Soon, even Ted Kennedy will roll over for off-shore wind farms; when he hears the energy costs twice as much. There are no dead bats, there are no dead birds (unless you check); and they don’t build them in China. Or Indonesia. Or Malaysia. Or India. Or anywhere else with INFRASTRUCTURE (by definition).

But maybe Germany lacks vast tracts of unused land targeted by T. Boone Pickens for unlimited energy production. Let me guess that T. Boone Pickens does not propose to fund the transmission system (no, it’s not really a guess). Picken’s wind farms will require the same guaranteed price floor as the Green Revolution off Germany. Except Pickens will still get paid, when the wind doesn’t blow (safe bet).

(benchmark: 15 cents per kilowatt hour – check your bill. I’ll be happy to provide you power at that cost; but it will be nuclear, which has an infinitesimal environmental impact, in comparison).

A Green Revolution off Germany’s Coast

. . . What has sparked this boom is Germany’s Renewable Energy Law (EEG) — or more precisely, the changes Germany’s parliament’s made to it in early June. The EEG sets fixed rates which have to be paid for renewable energy. Until now, the rate was 9 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity coming from offshore wind parks. The change means that operators can now bank on 15 cents per kilowatt hour. “That has an impact,” Ulf Gerder of the German WindEnergy Association says.

The first electricity from the flagship project Alpha Ventus is supposed to hit the grid in October. The 12 wind turbines are supplied by manufacturers Repower and Multibrid, and they will be erected in a lattice-like formation at a distance of 800 meters (a half mile) apart, meaning the wind farm will stretch over an area of four square kilometres (1.5 square miles) — the size of 550 football fields.

‘World Premiere’

The advantages of such an offshore wind farm are clear. The ones currently being planned in Germany won’t be visible from land, so people are unlikely to complain about them. And, because of the strength and consistency of sea winds, wind turbines located off the coast generate more power.

On the other hand, the challenges are greater as well. The water at the site of the proposed Alpha Ventus wind turbines in the North Sea is 30 to 40 meters deep — and the turbines have to be anchored in the seabed with steel posts. Spokesman Wiese talks about a “world premiere”, as the existing offshore wind farms off Scotland and Denmark stand in much shallower water.

Such difficulties also up the price tag. Alpha Ventus is to cost €180 million ($282 million) to build — nearly three times as much as a similar installation on land. The government is channelling €50 million ($78.7 million) into research. E.ON is footing the €40 million ($62.9 million) bill for the connection to the grid.

Such sums mean that offshore wind parks are likely to remain the province of established energy giants. To reach the government’s targets, €20 billion to €30 billion will have to be spent on wind turbine construction in the North and Baltic Seas. Smaller wind farms funded by local investment groups — a major part of the land-based windmill boom — won’t have a chance.

Maintenance promises to be expensive as well. Indeed, keeping offshore wind parks up and running makes up some 20 to 30 percent of total costs, according to industry estimates. Plus, the turbines have to be built to withstand gusts of 160 kilometers per hour and 15 meter high waves. On top of that there is the salty air — the Danish manufacturer Vestas, for example, has found corrosion to be a major problem on its offshore turbines.

article continues here . . .

CO2 Is Not A Factor

H/T: Gore Lied

AGW? Result of a corrupted political process (not carbon dioxide).

Zip up your coats.

History, and solar cycles repeat; whether man chooses to remember them, or not.

Don’t Drill the Oil; Poison Yourselves With It

Klockarman, over at Gore Lied, has this excellent story.

Natural oil seeps are polluting the Santa Barbara channel at “an astonishing rate.”

If we drilled the oil, it for sure would not end up toxifying the California coast.

Californians, or you, don’t need the oil, though, so we just let it seep; and blame “big oil” and a 1969 oil spill for the mess. Californians swim in the stuff, rather than drill it!

Remember, Al Gore and Obama say: energy is bad for you! Get used to it.

“The amount of oil seeping from the ocean floor since 1970 equals more than 31 times the amount of oil spilled in 1969,” he said.Over a 10-day period in 1969, an estimated 3 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County.

Fuel Of Choice

During Colorado’s record-breaking cold of the last few days, I was able to find a few faggots of wood left in the pile, and keep the house warm.

I could have burned natural gas; but the price has been set too high, by Al Gore.

America is progressing back to wood-burning culture, and it’s not even really cold yet.

The snow-leopard’s terrain (Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard”), treeless, is about to expand.

Good work, students of the environment.

Nuclear Energy Now Causing Global Warming

What did you expect, Steve Milloy?

In order to re-engineer humanity, some eggs must be broken.

Shortage of energy by itself will make food unavailable for broad slices of humankind, even if the next ice age does not. Economic dystopia is an opportunity for humanity to fix itself; to change; to at long last overcome human greed and self-interest. Progressives fear it not.

Hydroelectric power is also out. It causes global warming, too, in exactly the same way. Only the pathetically impractical sources of energy will be tolerated, until man becomes what progressives intend him to be (dead). After that, he won’t want energy.

Junk Science

Nuclear’s Wake-Up Call

. . . Maryland’s Gov. Martin O’Malley — who is well-regarded by environmentalists for consuming and metabolizing the green Kool-Aid on global warming — supports the Calvert Cliffs expansion. O’Malley apparently realizes that Maryland needs the electricity given the fact that the state is facing rolling blackouts on summer days starting as early as 2011. Moreover, nuclear power is emissions-free, another plus for Maryland’s warmer-in-chief. His support is even more remarkable since he recently barred the installation of wind turbines on public lands.

The governor’s picking nukes over wind must have sent the greens into meltdown. So in response, the desperate greens came up with a bizarre new argument: nuclear power causes global warming.

That’s right, nuclear is the latest form of “dirty” energy. How can that be, you ask? Nuclear power doesn’t produce greenhouse gases, does it? Well, not directly, the greens argue. But nuclear power “worsens climate change,” says prominent environmentalist Amory Lovins in a new paper, because it diverts money away from alternative energy and efficiency efforts that would otherwise reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Adding insult to injury, Lovins also says that nuclear power is “grossly uncompetitive, unneeded and obsolete” and “weakens electric reliability and national security.”

The head of Maryland PIRG picked up on Lovins’ line of thinking, telling Carbon Control News (Aug. 8) that “efficiency programs and renewables such as wind and solar can provide more carbon-abatement per dollar while avoiding the downsides of nuclear power.”

The movement to block the Calvert Cliffs plant also has an international component. Greenpeace has taken its anti-nuclear jihad to Finland, where a private utility company is currently building a European Pressurized Reactor (EPR) — a safer, more reliable and cheaper next-generation reactor. But Greenpeace has alleged technical and safety problems with the EPR and misconduct in the Finns’ safety approval process. Though the Finnish regulatory authority has rejected the misconduct claims, it nevertheless announced that it plans further studies on the EPR’s safety.

This, of course, has delighted the opponents of the Calvert Cliffs expansion since the reactor that has been proposed to be built is an EPR.

And the greens aren’t just going after the Calvert Cliffs plant, they are turning their sights on the entire nuclear industry. No doubt this is a direct result of the industry’s effort to expand in the wake of global warming hysteria, which has taken the form of more than 20 applications to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency for new plant licenses.

Totally More Likely Than AGW

That is not water covering Manhattan

At least, not liquid water.

Hurry and fork over your carbon dioxide tax ASAP . . . stop carbon dioxide emissions now. Send in your money to develop wind turbine power, just in time to save the Earth. Our central bureaucrats know the future; they just don’t know the past.

Certain parties (including James Hansen) may soon wish they had not blocked energy infrastructure in the world. On the other hand, they are kooks anyway – wealthy kooks. Destroying your own credibility can have global repercussions, Jim, however much you enjoyed it.

Dearth Of Sunspot Activity To Herald New Ice Age?

Forecasts of a sharp cooling trend are backed by the UK’s Armagh Observatory, which has been observing solar activity for over 200 years.

The observatory notes that solar cycles 21 and 22, which were characterized by being short and intense in their activity, led to the natural global warming observed in the 80’s and 90’s.

“Cycle 23, which hasn’t finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak,” writes one observatory scientist.

“Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years….“Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern,” concludes David Watt.

“Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century’s opening decade,” reports the Chicago Tribune. “There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That’s by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930.”

The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.

“The sun’s surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun’s 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century,” reports one science blog.

Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.

Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.

H/T Ice Age Now: Dearth of sunspot activity to herald new ice age?