Month: February 2023

Electricity generation with 100% renewables is a fantasy

Ontario buys ‘renewable’ power for dollars, and sells it for pennies

BY ANDREW ROMAN, Dec. 3, 2022, Andrew’s Views

Renewables advocates have been claiming that solar and wind generation are now the least costly form of generation, and therefore, should replace all fossil fuel generation as quickly as possible.  Is this correct? 

A number of energy analysts have reminded us that weather-dependent wind and solar generation are necessarily intermittent, requiring costly backup when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.  However, few commentators have examined actual operating experience in as much detail as Parker Gallant, a retired international banker.  A large part of this blog post is based on Mr.… Read more

Suing the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency)

Brief by Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC) challenges the EPA’s ‘science’ that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare

By Francis Menton, Feb. 11, 2023, Manhattan Contrarian

The briefing is now complete in Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council v. EPA. That is the case, currently pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where a small and brave band of electricity consumers, CHECC, challenges the “science” behind EPA’s 2009 finding that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” constitute a danger to human health and welfare. I am one of the attorneys for CHECC.

In the case, we ask the court to compel EPA to go back and re-assess the “science” of greenhouse gas “endangerment.”… Read more

Mainstream media get it wrong on extreme weather—again (and again)

Actual data shows the global trend for floods and drought is downward rather than upward

By Ralph Alexander, Clintel, Jan. 27, 2023

The popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes are worsening be­cause of climate change has been bolstered in recent years by ever increasing hype in nearly all mainstream media coverage of extreme events, despite a lack of scientific evidence for the assertion. This month’s story by NPR (National Public Radio) in the U.S. is just the latest in a steady drumbeat of media misinformation.

Careful examination of the actual data reveals that if there is any trend in most weather extremes, it is downward rather than upward.… Read more

The Paul Ehrlich Apocalypse is back!

Despite utter failure of predictions of deadly ‘population bomb,’ biologist still preaching humanity’s doom while ignoring role of human ingenuity

Editorial, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2023

We’ll say this for Paul Ehrlich—at least he’s consistent. In 1968 the Stanford biologist famously declared that “the battle to feed all humanity is over,” at a time when the earth’s population was about 3.5 billion. Today we have a population of eight billion (better fed than ever), yet there was Mr. Ehrlich, on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, still predicting that “humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we’re sawing off.”… Read more

We need debate over role of fossil fuels that goes beyond Net Zero

Is massive attempt to transform global energy system working against the interests of humankind? We should be asking this question

By Terence Corcoran, National Post, Feb. 8, 2023

The global policy consensus on the future of energy is clear: Fossil fuels are done, finished, peaking, on the way out and never to return once their 100-year role as the engine of human progress has been reduced to net-zero by 2050. That, at least, is the general thrust of the 2023 edition of the BP Energy Outlook released last week based on BP’S carbon control policy models.

The BP outlook is short but densely speculative, and not particularly convincing one way or another.… Read more

2022: Another year of media climate exaggeration—because hysteria sells

News sources continue to mislead the public into thinking there is a dramatic change in frequency and intensity of hurricanes and flooding

By Hol­man W. Jenk­ins, Jr., Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, 2022

Exaggeration is the universal media bias. Hysteria sells and is also a form of personal signaling. No wonder 2022 was another busy year for hyperbole on many fronts, including on climate.

In a tweet thread, Patrick Brown, an atmospheric scientist at the climate-action-supporting Breakthrough Institute, wondered why, apart from increased rainfall, the news media “insist on a framing that misleads its audience into thinking we have experienced a dramatic change in hurricane frequency/intensity?”… Read more

How computer models get it wrong while seducing their creators

A review of Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson

By David A. Shay­witz, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 2022

We live in an information age, as the cliché has it— really an age of information overload. But “measured quantities do not speak for themselves,” observes Erica Thompson, a statistician and a fellow at the London School of Economics. Data, she notes, are given meaning “only through the context and framing provided by models.”

When we want to know how rapidly a new infectious virus is likely to spread, we turn to mathematical models. Models are used by climate scientists to project global warming; by options traders to price contracts; by the Congressional Budget Office to forecast the economic effects of legislation; by meteorologists to warn of approaching storms.… Read more

New York under water by 2050? Not if you believe the sea-level data

The Battery’s sea level hasn’t done anything in recent decades that it hasn’t done over the past century

By Steven E. Koonin, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 5, 2023

A recent National Aeronautics and Space Administration report yet again raises alarm that New Yorkers are about to be inundated by rapidly rising seas. But a review of the data suggests that such warnings need to be taken with more than a few grains of sea salt.

The record of sea level measured at the southern tip of Manhattan, known as the Battery, begins in 1856. It shows that today’s waters are 19 inches higher than they were 166 years ago, rising an average of 3.5 inches every 30 years.… Read more