Global Climate Change Science News

[cronus]

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 135248.htm



The only way is to shut down the global economy, at least for a while and nearly completely. Compartmentalize global trade back to national and local systems.

[Seth]

Study: Wind Farms Even More Expensive And Pointless Than You Thought
Reuters
Reuters

by James Delingpole7 Jul 20150
The cost of wind energy is significantly more expensive than its advocates pretend, a new US study has found.

If you believe this chart produced by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), then onshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of power – more competitive than nuclear, coal or hydro, and a lot more than solar.

EIA_LCOE_AEO2013

But when you take into account the true costs of wind, it’s around 48 per cent more expensive than the industry’s official estimates – according to new research conducted by Utah State University.

“In this study, we refer to the ‘true cost’ of wind as the price tag consumers and society as a whole pay both to purchase wind-generated electricity and to subsidize the wind energy industry through taxes and government debt,” said Ryan Yonk Ph.D., one of the report’s authors and a founder of Strata Policy. “After examining all of these cost factors and carefully reviewing existing cost estimates, we were able to better understand how much higher the cost is for Americans.”

The peer-reviewed report accounted for the following factors:

The federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), a crucial subsidy for wind producers, has distorted the energy market by artificially lowering the cost of expensive technologies and directing taxpayer money to the wind industry.
States have enacted Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) that require utilities to purchase electricity produced from renewable sources, which drives up the cost of electricity for consumers.
Because wind resources are often located far from existing transmission lines, expanding the grid is expensive, and the costs are passed on to taxpayers and consumers.
Conventional generators must be kept on call as backup to meet demand when wind is unable to do so, driving up the cost of electricity for consumers.

“Innovation is a wonderful thing and renewable energy is no exception. Wind power has experienced tremendous growth since the 1990’s, but it has largely been a response to generous federal subsidies,” Yonk stated.

Among the factors wind advocates fail to acknowledge, the report shows, is the “opportunity cost” of the massive subsidies which taxpayers are forced to provide in order to persuade producers to indulge in this otherwise grotesquely inefficient and largely pointless form of power generation.

In the US this amounts to an annual $5 billion per year in Production Tax Credits (PTC). Here is money that could have been spent on education, healthcare, defence or, indeed, which could have been left in the pockets of taxpayers to spend as they prefer.

Instead it has been squandered on bribing rent-seeking crony-capitalists to carpet the landscape with bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes to produce energy so intermittent that it is often unavailable when needed most (on very hot or very cold days when demand for air-conditioning or heating is high) and only too available on other occasions when a glut means that wind producers actually have to pay utilities to accept their unwanted energy. This phenomenon, known as “negative pricing”, is worthwhile to wind producers because they only get their subsidy credits when they are producing power (whether it is needed or not). But clearly not worthwhile to the people who end up footing the bill: ie taxpayers.

Hence the observation of serial wind energy “investor” Warren Buffett, who says: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

But even this report may underestimate the real costs of wind energy. It doesn’t account for the damage caused to the health of people unfortunate enough to live near wind turbines, as acknowledged officially for the first time in this report produced for the Australian government.

Nor does it account for the environmental blight caused to the landscape – far greater, as Christopher Booker has reported, than that created by the greenies’ bete noire fracking.

When Professor David MacKay stepped down as chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) last year, he produced a report comparing the environmental impact of a fracking site to that of wind farms. Over 25 years, he calculated, a single “shale gas pad” covering five acres, with a drilling rig 85ft high (only needed for less than a year), would produce as much energy as 87 giant wind turbines, covering 5.6 square miles and visible up to 20 miles away. Yet, to the greenies, the first of these, capable of producing energy whenever needed, without a penny of subsidy, is anathema; while the second, producing electricity very unreliably in return for millions of pounds in subsidies, fills them with rapture.

Nor yet does it factor in the epic destruction of avian fauna caused by these supposedly eco-friendly devices. According to Oxford University ecologist Clive Hambler:

Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’

Because wind farms tend to be built on uplands, where there are good thermals, they kill a disproportionate number of raptors. In Australia, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle is threatened with global extinction by wind farms. In north America, wind farms are killing tens of thousands of raptors including golden eagles and America’s national bird, the bald eagle. In Spain, the Egyptian vulture is threatened, as too is the Griffon vulture — 400 of which were killed in one year at Navarra alone. Norwegian wind farms kill over ten white-tailed eagles per year and the population of Smøla has been severely impacted by turbines built against the opposition of ornithologists.

Nor are many other avian species safe. In North America, for example, proposed wind farms on the Great Lakes would kill large numbers of migratory songbirds. In the Atlantic, seabirds such as the Manx Shearwater are threatened. Offshore wind farms are just as bad as onshore ones, posing a growing threat to seabirds and migratory birds, and reducing habitat availability for marine birds (such as common scoter and eider ducks).

In Britain, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has belatedly acknowledged the problem – which his Prime Minister’s “greenest government ever” helped create – by promising to rein in green energy subsidies.

The cost of subsidising new wind farms is spiralling out of control, government sources have privately warned.

Officials admitted that so-called “green” energy schemes will require a staggering £9 billion a year in subsidies – paid for by customers – by 2020. This is £1.5 billion more than the maximum limit the coalition had originally planned.

The mounting costs will mean every household in the country is forced to pay an estimated £170 a year by the end of the decade to support the renewable electricity schemes that were promoted by the coalition.

But given the damage that has already done to the British landscape by wind turbines it may well be a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Especially when you consider that this man has already made £100 million out of the scam and that there are no mechanisms to get any of that wasted money back.

[Seth]

Lotsa crickets chirping here since the evidence started showing the Warmists are wrong.

Is a mini ICE AGE on the way? Scientists warn the sun will 'go to sleep' in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet

New study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles
Says that between 2030 and 2040 solar cycles will cancel each other out
Could lead to 'Maunder minimum' effect that saw River Thames freeze over

By Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com

Published: 12:40 EST, 10 July 2015 | Updated: 15:42 EST, 10 July 2015

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The Earth could be headed for a 'mini ice age' researchers have warned.

A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles - and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out.

This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the 'Maunder minimum' - which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London's River Thames to freeze over.

Scroll down for video
A silent sun: In 2011 this image was captured showing an almost clear sun - which experts say could happen for almost a decade from 2030.
+3

A silent sun: In 2011 this image was captured showing an almost clear sun - which experts say could happen for almost a decade from 2030.
THE SOLAR CYCLE

Conventional wisdom holds that solar activity swings back and forth like a simple pendulum.

At one end of the cycle, there is a quiet time with few sunspots and flares.

At the other end, solar max brings high sunspot numbers and frequent solar storms.

It's a regular rhythm that repeats every 11 years.

Reality is more complicated.

Astronomers have been counting sunspots for centuries, and they have seen that the solar cycle is not perfectly regular.

The new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat.

It draws on dynamo effects in two layers of the Sun, one close to the surface and one deep within its convection zone.

Predictions from the model suggest that solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the 'mini ice age' that began in 1645, according to the results presented by Prof Valentina Zharkova at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno.

The model predicts that the pair of waves become increasingly offset during Cycle 25, which peaks in 2022.

During Cycle 26, which covers the decade from 2030-2040, the two waves will become exactly out of synch and this will cause a significant reduction in solar activity.

'In cycle 26, the two waves exactly mirror each other – peaking at the same time but in opposite hemispheres of the Sun,' said Zharkova.

'Their interaction will be disruptive, or they will nearly cancel each other.

'We predict that this will lead to the properties of a 'Maunder minimum''
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'Effectively, when the waves are approximately in phase, they can show strong interaction, or resonance, and we have strong solar activity.

'When they are out of phase, we have solar minimums.

'When there is full phase separation, we have the conditions last seen during the Maunder minimum, 370 years ago.'
THE MAUNDER MINIMUM

The Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time.

It caused London's River Thames to freeze over, and 'frost fairs' became popular.

This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the 'Little Ice Age' when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes.

There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past, Nasa says.

The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research.

Some scientists hypothesize that the dense wood used in Stradivarius instruments was caused by slow tree growth during the cooler period.

Instrument maker Antonio Stradivari was born a year before the start of the Maunder Minimum.
Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time

Maunder Minimum (also known as the prolonged sunspot minimum) is the name used for the period starting in about 1645 and continuing to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time

It is 172 years since a scientist first spotted that the Sun's activity varies over a cycle lasting around 10 to 12 years.

But every cycle is a little different and none of the models of causes to date have fully explained fluctuations.
The Frozen Thames, 1677 - an oil painting by Abraham Hondius shows the old London Bridge during the Maunder Minimum

The Frozen Thames, 1677 - an oil painting by Abraham Hondius shows the old London Bridge during the Maunder Minimum

Many solar physicists have put the cause of the solar cycle down to a dynamo caused by convecting fluid deep within the Sun.

Now, Zharkova and her colleagues have found that adding a second dynamo, close to the surface, completes the picture with surprising accuracy.

'We found magnetic wave components appearing in pairs, originating in two different layers in the Sun's interior,' she said.

'They both have a frequency of approximately 11 years, although this frequency is slightly different, and they are offset in time.

'Over the cycle, the waves fluctuate between the northern and southern hemispheres of the Sun. Combining both waves together and comparing to real data for the current solar cycle, we found that our predictions showed an accuracy of 97%,' said Zharkova.
Montage of images of solar activity between August 1991 and September 2001 taken by the Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telecope, showing variation in solar activity during a sunspot cycle.

Montage of images of solar activity between August 1991 and September 2001 taken by the Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telecope, showing variation in solar activity during a sunspot cycle.

Zharkova and her colleagues derived their model using a technique called 'principal component analysis' of the magnetic field observations from the Wilcox Solar Observatory in California.

They examined three solar cycles-worth of magnetic field activity, covering the period from 1976-2008.

In addition, they compared their predictions to average sunspot numbers, another strong marker of solar activity.

All the predictions and observations were closely matched.

[Tero]

It's the fucking Daily Mail!

no need to cut and pate the whole thing either
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... ummet.html

[Seth]

It's the fucking Daily Mail!

no need to cut and pate the whole thing either
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... ummet.html

Circumstantial ad hominem fallacy. Can you refute the specific claims made? And I don't want to put the link, I want to post the whole article, so there!

[Tero]

What is the point of refuting Daily Mail?

Headline generator:
Daily Mail-o-Matic

»WILL THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT INFECT YOUR PENSION WITH AIDS?»

HAS RIP-OFF BRITAIN BURGLED THE MEMORY OF DIANA?

IS TWITTER MAKING DRIVERS IMPOTENT?

Refute those.

[mistermack]

Not just the Daily Mail.
It's here in the Science Daily, and they quote the source as the Royal Astronomical Society :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 092955.htm

It will take time to verify if this model produces accurate results. At the moment, it suffers from the the same problem that Earth climate models do.
It's easy to produce a model that works, matching the known historical facts. You just keep fine-tuning the model till it matches. Keep what works, and discard what doesn't.
That doesn't mean that it can ever accurately predict the future.

[cronus]

Not just the Daily Mail.
It's here in the Science Daily, and they quote the source as the Royal Astronomical Society :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 092955.htm

It will take time to verify if this model produces accurate results. At the moment, it suffers from the the same problem that Earth climate models do.
It's easy to produce a model that works, matching the known historical facts. You just keep fine-tuning the model till it matches. Keep what works, and discard what doesn't.
That doesn't mean that it can ever accurately predict the future.

ET controls the Sun and saw you needed the knob on the heat turning down....

[cronus]

Not just the Daily Mail.
It's here in the Science Daily, and they quote the source as the Royal Astronomical Society :

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 092955.htm

It will take time to verify if this model produces accurate results. At the moment, it suffers from the the same problem that Earth climate models do.
It's easy to produce a model that works, matching the known historical facts. You just keep fine-tuning the model till it matches. Keep what works, and discard what doesn't.
That doesn't mean that it can ever accurately predict the future.

ET controls the Sun and saw you needed the knob on the heat turning down....

[Tero]

You have to relate this 60% irradiance change to a real life event. events after 1300 are just counts of solar sports. We need w/m2. So far the sun is minor:

[mistermack]

You have to relate this 60% irradiance change to a real life event. events after 1300 are just counts of solar sports. We need w/m2. So far the sun is minor:

You haven't understood what they said. A sixty percent irradiance change is just so ludicrous, I can't believe you contemplated that as a fact.

Look again, and what they said was a sixty percent change in solar activity. It's a misleading statement. The output of the Sun actually varies by a lot less than one percent, in the timescale of mere thousands of years. It's incredibly constant.
Look at the graph you posted. Output varies between 1365 and 1366 over 120 years.

It's sunspot activity that varies. A sixty percent change in sunspot activity, if sustained, could theoretically affect the climate somewhat.
A 60% irradiance change would turn the Earth into an ice desert in weeks.

Edit :
It could possibly even cause the Sun to go to the red giant stage, and swallow the Earth whole, as the Sun is in balance between the force exerted by energy production of fusion, and gravity trying to collapse it.

[Tero]

OK, case dismissed. Seth dismissed for copying and pasting.

[Seth]

What is the point of refuting Daily Mail?

To avoid committing the circumstantial ad hominem fallacy of course.

[Seth]

It's sunspot activity that varies. A sixty percent change in sunspot activity, if sustained, could theoretically affect the climate somewhat.

And the point of the article is that sunspot activity is an indicator of solar output, not a measure thereof, and it theorizes that we may be going into a Maunder Minimum period of solar sunspot activity which may correlate with a (tiny but significant) decrease in solar output, which in the past has lead to global cooling.

[mistermack]

And the point of the article is that sunspot activity is an indicator of solar output, not a measure thereof, and it theorizes that we may be going into a Maunder Minimum period of solar sunspot activity which may correlate with a (tiny but significant) decrease in solar output, which in the past has lead to global cooling.

Like I posted before, it's worthless, apart from the academic interest.

Tell me about a model that will predict horse race results, and I'm not going to put my money on it till it makes a real successful prediction.
A prediction of the future, not of the past.

Can this predict accurately sunspot activity? Nobody knows.
Would that sunspot lack of activity cool the climate? Nobody knows.

It's as useful as the rest of climate science.