RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3762043-europes-climate-obsession-could-prove-deadly/

The wind has died down again in Europe. Unless you’re selling kites or umbrellas, you probably don’t care.

But if you’re a public official, responsible for making sure your citizens stay warm this winter, you may be panicking. In the climate-obsessed European Union (EU) and United Kingdom (UK), where a decades-long war against fossil fuels caused a radical shift to unstable power sources and enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energy chokehold, a growing dependence on wind power is again a source of anxiety.

As the Wall Street Journal reported recently: “wind speeds in Hamburg fell to around 5 meters a second, or about 11 miles an hour, according to the weather forecasting site windy.com.” That wind velocity is apparently the “minimum speed required for electricity generation.”

The Journal explains, “Speeds of around 15 meters a second, or 33 mph, are needed to produce maximum power generation.” Come again? The U.S. weather service declares winds of 31 mph to 63 mph “gale force”; so, all those wind towers being built on the continent and in the U.S. require massive wind speeds to be fully productive? Who knew?

The sad fact is our politicians don’t know, and neither, it seems, do the people running Europe. Even as European countries rush to destroy their economies by pandering to unrealistic climate goals, the U.S. ignores the devastating results.  

EU countries have made every wrong turn imaginable in catering to their aggressive climate lobbies — making harmful decisions of exactly the kind being foisted onto Americans via the Biden White House. The climate zealots in the Biden administration, who have plugged global warming considerations into every policy plank of every federal agency, seem to have learned exactly nothing from Europe’s entirely self-inflicted woes.  

Europe decided some years ago to move away from fossil fuels, banking on renewables like wind and solar power to supply an increasing portion of their energy needs. Incredibly, today the most-consumed renewable fuel on the continent is wood, which one team of climate scientists says “emits more CO2 emissions than coal.”

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/12/03/study-hey-these-offshore-wind-farms-arent-good-for-the-ecosystem-n515359

There are wind farms being put up all over the place these days, including in many rural areas of the United States. But the offshore wind farms that have been constructed in the North Sea by various European power companies have created a forest of towers rising up over the waves. But that’s not a problem, right? After all, this is the “clean energy” we were all promised and we’re saving the planet so everyone can feel better about themselves. The Biden administration recently announced plans to accelerate offshore wind farm construction in the name of “environmental justice, biodiversity, and protecting our oceans.” But according to one peer-reviewed study published in a prominent nature journal, those wind farms aren’t really good for the ocean ecosystem at all. And they create “substantial” negative impacts on marine life and ocean conditions. Oops. (The Blaze)

In September, the Biden administration announced its “ambitious” plans to expand American offshore wind energy “while advancing environmental justice, protecting biodiversity, and promoting ocean co-use.” A new study has cast significant doubt on whether the White House’s plan and similar initiatives to tackle so-called climate change can be accomplished without creating some substantial negative environmental changes all their own.

In addition to impacting regional atmosphere, “multiple physical, biological, and chemical impacts on the marine system have been identified,” all resultant of these “environmentally jus[t]” solutions.

Previously, researchers had only theorized about the impact of the wind wake effect offshore wind farms had on marine life and ocean conditions. A peer-reviewed study published in the Springer Nature journal “Communications Earth & Environment” revealed that the effects of these wind farms are “substantial.”

https://www.city-journal.org/climate-change-conference-devises-wrong-solutions

It’s often said that members of Generation Z are clueless, and the signs that these young people held at the November COP27 conference are evidence of that proposition. They fail to see the big picture. Let’s accept, for the moment, the premise of their advocacy: that human activities produce greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as carbon dioxide, which give rise to atmospheric warming, and thus to some degree of disruption and damage. Even so, as these health-care professionals should know, any cure should not be worse than the disease—but that’s precisely what we see in many proposed remedies for climate change.

Climate activists are clamoring for expensive interventions, including massive transformations of energy production, modes of transportation, building design, and even diminished population growth. They also want huge amounts of monetary compensation paid to poor countries to offset climate change-related environmental and economic damage. The most popular interventions include monumental expenditures on subsidies for wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles. But will these measures produce the desired results? And isn’t it possible that depriving taxpayers of the vast resources required to fund climate measures would itself produce negative effects?

The En-ROADS climate model, created by and maintained by Climate Interactive and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, provides answers. En-ROADS is a highly complex, interactive model with a simple interface that allows users to explore and understand the effects of various interventions that influence climate, including the use of coal, nuclear, wind, and solar power, increasing the numbers of electric vehicles (EVs), the planting of trees, and so on.

En-ROADS examines the effects on temperature rise of global implementation of these various parameters out to the year 2100. It predicts that, if nothing is done by then, the planet’s temperature will rise by about 3.6 degrees Celsius. Maximal global use of wind turbines, solar panels, and other renewables would reduce that rise by only 0.2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. Maximal incentives for a transition to electric vehicles globally would yield a similar reduction. For shorter periods, such as 30 years from now, those reductions, taken together, would amount to less than 0.05 degrees Celsius—in other words, negligible. Is this worth a price tag of more than $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States?

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-29-dont-be-so-sure-that-the-climate-extremists-have-won

Undoubtedly, the question right now at the top of everyone’s mind is, When is the Manhattan Contrarian’s Energy Storage Report coming out? After all, he previously promised it for September, and then October, and here we are almost in December and we still haven’t seen it.

It’s a fair question. Being a blogger, I don’t have much appreciation for the formalities of the publication process. In blogging, you finish the post, do a quick proofread, press “Publish,” and there it is. With this, it has been rounds of peer review, editing, typesetting, proofreading, and so forth. However, I’m now told that the official issue date will be Thursday, December 1.

After the publication, I’ll have several posts expounding on parts of the Report, particularly those portions that cover topics I have not already beaten to death here on the blog. But for now I want to focus on the most important aspect of this, which is: Don’t get discouraged in thinking that the climate extremists have “won.” They have not.

It does not really matter that the climate extremists at the moment control all of the commanding heights of our culture — the media, academia, most big corporations, and the Executive Branch of the government. What matters is that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work and cannot work. It’s only a question of when and how it fails — and of how big the political blowback will be when that happens. The main Achilles heel of the proposals is the problem of energy storage.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/scientific_facts_rarely_appear_at_climate_change_conferences.html

Politicians, bureaucrats, the UN, and a bunch of rich people had another climate change gabfest in Egypt that ended recently. These people flew in hundreds of private jets for a conference where they pretended that they could control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activity forever and pretended they cared about their carbon footprint.

Instead of presenting scientific facts, they base their policies on inaccurate and easily manipulated computer models. Facts would be inconvenient when they are trying to scare eight billion people into submission.

In 1989, the UN predicted we only had ten years left to save the planet from the existential threat of climate change. In 2022, 33 years later, their newest dire prediction is that we still have around ten years left. No matter how far off previous predictions have been, the new predictions are more threatening. They have to figure out a way to confiscate massive amounts of money from the people for their radical green agenda.

Here are some facts they don’t talk about:

That extreme cold has hit the South Pole this month.
That the South Pole had record cold temperatures in the six-month winter of 2020-2021
That 2022 was a relatively mild hurricane period, just like the ten years after Hurricane Katrina hit.
That we had extreme cold weather in the U.S this month along with record snow in the Northeast.
That the Arctic icecaps have been expanding the last ten years, contrary to predictions that the ice would be gone by now.
That the coral reef off Australia is growing with a vengeance
That wildfires were down 80% from the last five-year average.
After 150 years of exponential growth of crude oil and coal use, and rapid growth in the population and all the other components we are told cause warming, the dire predictions have all been false.
The temperature is only up one to two degrees after a Little Ice Age ended in 1860 and the Earth now has a temperature similar to over 1,000 years ago in the Medieval Warming Period.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/magic-cars/

Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.

But that’s absurd.

Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.

“The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.

But here’s inconvenient fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy.

“Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.

Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that “oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline.”

But future batteries will be better, I point out.

“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”

That’s inconvenient fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.

“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”

Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.