Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Inconvenient truths for those that support cheap clean energy, and a price on carbon

I happened upon a very good article by Joshua S. Goldstein and Steven Pinker, concerning how the modern environmental movement is doing themselves no favors by removing carbon dioxide clean nuclear energy from the table.  The authors do themselves no favors themselves though, by including a carbon tax into the solution mix with renewables.

As climate change skeptics and/or doubters have long known, the likes of Greenpeace, NRDC and Sierra Club recycle nothing more than anti-nuclear rhetoric.  Many of these skeptics may take exception to the certainty of the predictions of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, but, they can be quite indifferent to using nuclear power as dispatchable and reliable electricity generation.

Greenpeace, NRDC, Sierra Club and many others of the Green Blob industry only push for a few electricity generation technologies: Wind Power, Solar Power, and Biomass Power.

While wind and solar are terribly expensive, without subsidies, Biomass Power is just silly if there is to be any sort of imaginary negative emissions in the carbon dioxide reduction cycle, but it is at least a baseload source.

Looking for examples of cheap energy with a carbon tax, one will be disappointed.

Germany is a great demonstration of renewables without nuclear and using coal at $350 per GigaWatt hour,  While France is using over 80% nuclear and 15% renewable-like technologies is in at $190 per GigaWatt hour.  Renewables will always drive the cost of electricity up.  Why?

http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm

Well, you already know the answer to that one. 

"You can not use taxes as a revenue generator AND a use deterrent at the same time"

So, in order to make solar and wind power costs lower, one taxes the carbon dioxide generators by $100/GW hour and subsidize the renewables down $100/GW hour and the consumer's electricity bill doubles.

Then, when they phase out all of the carbon dioxide generators, the consumer's bill goes back to triple or quadruple of what the price was before the carbon tax.

If one were to truly care about the environment and the energy impoverished, the choice is obvious.

Skip renewables altogether and the carbon tax, install only nuclear.


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Sunday, September 20, 2015

For the Children

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Thursday, July 2, 2015

Looking Backward, a blip in the terrestrial time scale.

A little perspective


Once upon a time during the last Ice age
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Wednesday, June 3, 2015

What's in a name?

Global Warming vs Climate Change, how did the change happen?




It's all about messaging. When Global Warming became passe, it was necessary to raise a new Boogie Man.

H/T @BarryJWoods

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Tuesday, May 19, 2015

How far the Science has fallen.

Republished with permission from http://judithcurry.com/2015/05/19/what-can-we-do-about-climate-change/

Willis Eschenbach | May 19, 2015 at 12:59 pm | Reply
Both Gutting and Jamieson accept the IPCC conclusions, and even seem to think that ‘dangerous’ climate change is already happening. So starting from that particular premise (with which I know many people here will disagree), Gutting and Jamieson bring some refreshing realism to debate on how we should think about climate change and what we should do about it.
So this is how far science has fallen? Here’s the new scientific paradigm.
Someone “thinks” that something dangerous is happening. He doesn’t know how it’s happening. He can’t say why it’s happening. He doesn’t have any data to show that anything dangerous is going on. But by gosh, he’s convinced it’s happening … or to be more accurate, that it will happen in a decade or two. Of course he’s been saying this for three decades now, but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..
So what scientists should do, according to this paradigm, is to assume that Chicken Little is right and the sky actually is falling, and start looking for solutions to a problem when:
• we don’t know if the “problem” is actually happening, and
• all predictions of calamities which this “problem” is claimed to cause have proven wrong to date, and not just wrong but calamitously wrong … and
• if the “problem” is happening, we don’t know why, and
• the models of the “problem” have all diverged from reality,
• we don’t know if we can establish climate causality or predict the future evolution of the climate even in theory, so in response,
• alarmists all sit in a circle and jerk about how to deal with this as-yet-unverified “problem” and talk about poor scientific communication and how “deniers” are psychologically damaged, and meanwhile
• we piss huge unspecified amounts of money into various rose-colored holes in the ground and
• we plan to reorganize the entire energy system of the planet, using untried, unreliable, and uneconomic renewable sources, and
• we give billions to line the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt third world dictators and apparatchiks, which under the new scientific paradigm is described by words like “compensation, not inaction” and “helping the poor” and “carbon-capture” and “making things revenue-neutral”.
Pathetic. Farkin’ pathetic.
Judith, you tried this “new paradigm” hogwash before, most notably with Captain Ravetz and his Post-Normal Science Avengers explaining why this problem needs new science …
Climate, while it is a wickedly tough problem, does not require some new kind of scientific paradigm. It just requires equally tough, honest science, science of the plain old-fashioned variety that doesn’t start with the assumption that there is a problem and go haring off after an imaginary solution. You know … real science with things like the “null hypothesis” and transparency, the good old-fashioned science which far too many modern climate scientists do their best to ignore.
Regards,
w.

Thanks, Willis, Appreciate the permission to repost!
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Sunday, May 17, 2015

Thor Hammers on the Poor

(Guest post by @SlagOffTwits from Storify)



Actually RE + storage is THE most expensive electricity option. It is strictly a boutique or prestige item, like a Tesla or a Rolex. There are better, much less expensive options. It would take massive subsidies to move them into the residential market in any scale.




This is the basis of the whole argument... that somehow more expensive power is better. Yet we KNOW that one of the primary reasons for the developed world's rapid advances is cheap energy, and one of the primary reasons the developing world hasn't caught up is the lack of cheap energy.








Well, we certainly agree on this one point. FIT has been a nightmare Ontario can't wake from...



One OR the other, not of... stupid fingers... We get to the logical fallacy part of the ideological argument, false dichotomy in this case. Why does it have to be FIT or carbon tax? It could be something else, or neither. The logical response to a challenge is to examine whether or not a solution is needed, and if so which is the best. If action IS warranted, a cost/benefit analysis helps determine the best course of action.









Non sequitur





No, I am wary of solutions that are worse than problems. That's why analysts exist. That's why we have insurance. That's why risk assessment and abatement is a growing field.





A simply bizarre statement that again highlights the partisan blinders in use... Wind and solar are the least effective and most expensive solutions in almost all circumstances. And require backup generation at idle. Just try heating your house with wind and solar on those loooong, still -40F northern nights. And forget about using them to power your car to drive somewhere warm.








Don't answer to my point. Go for the redirection ad hom...















Well this confirms what I just said about "ideological position". You aren't giving reasons. You aren't weighing costs vs benefits. You aren't considering resource allocation. You are just stating something must be, and damn any other considerations. This is the very definition of dogma. And I JUST stated in the previous tweet that this isn't taking into consideration human needs. I guess people can fuck right off when dogma demands.








When you are too lazy or incompetent to back an ideological brain fart with evidence and sound argument, ALWAYS go for the insult.







Corollary to Godwin's Law...





Notice the clever use of hashtag to invite dogpile.


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Monday, April 20, 2015

New Paper Uses the Lindzen, Choi 2011 "Iris-Effect" and gets Stunning Reality

A new paper was published today in Nature Geoscience titled "Missing iris effect as a possible cause of muted hydrological change and high climate sensitivity in models", co-written by Bjorn Stevens who seems to be interested in why the models run so hot.

From the abstract we have:
A controversial hypothesis suggests that the dry and clear regions of the tropical atmosphere expand in a warming climate and thereby allow more infrared radiation to escape to space. This so-called iris effect could constitute a negative feedback that is not included in climate models. We find that inclusion of such an effect in a climate model moves the simulated responses of both temperature and the hydrological cycle to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations closer to observations.
 (Bold is mine.)

That is a complete understatement.  Many readers will be familiar with the 'tropics troposphere of doom' such as this:



With the Iris Effect applied 100%, models get MUCH closer to reality:


Another line of evidence that the oceans are the real climate regulator.

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