RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/27/that-dirty-green-energy-2/

While governments from Washington westward to California are forcing vaccinations on Americans whether they want the shots or not, don’t forget that policymakers want to do much the same with renewable energy. But renewables aren’t the unalloyed good we’re told they are. They have nasty downsides.

The forms of energy accepted by activists and politicians as “renewable” or “green” are restricted to wind and solar. While both are renewable (and are intermittent and therefore unreliable), neither is truly green. In this editorial, we will focus on solar, just to keep things short.

Solar power depends on photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight to electricity. Those panels, indispensable to the process, are where solar power’s green reputation breaks down.

To start with, solar panels have a lifespan of roughly 25 to 30 years, so at some point, they become trash. (For the record, powering the world with solar energy would require more than 51 billion panels, which would take up more than 115,000 square miles, a parcel of land larger than Arizona.)

There are nearly 1.5 million panels right now in the lower 48.) What do we do with them?

Solar panels are recyclable – technically. But “the process in which materials are separated can be tedious and requires advanced machinery,” says CED Greentech, which means energy will be burned to extract the components.

Consequently, most dead solar panels, which are in fact considered hazardous waste, end up in landfills. Which isn’t green at all, since the greens despise landfills.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/greenpeace-co-founder-joins-climate-change-skeptics

Polar bears would not exist today without climate change, and they may even be thriving because of current climate trends. That’s what the co-founder of Greenpeace told scientists, economists, and academics who took part in an international conference challenging alarmist claims about global warming.

Patrick Moore, a Canadian environmentalist who previously served as president of Greenpeace Canada and director of Greenpeace International, was one of several speakers featured as part of the Heartland Institute’s conference on the topic held this month.

During his talk, Moore described some of the events that helped gain notoriety for Greenpeace, such as the campaigns directed against nuclear testing and whale hunting dating back to the 1970s. He eventually felt compelled to leave Greenpeace when activists began to lose sight of their humanitarian mission while engaging in campaigns that were not rooted in sound science, he explained.

“At a philosophical level, Greenpeace had started with a strong humanitarian orientation to save human civilization from nuclear war,” Moore said. “That meant we actually liked people. That’s the peace in Greenpeace. The green, of course, was the environment. … I decided to fashion myself a sensible environmentalist basing my positions on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, and fear.”

Moore is now a director for the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that includes scientists devoted to highlighting the benefits of carbon dioxide. He is also the author of a new book titled Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, which takes aim at what Moore described as “scare stories” that cannot be justified on the basis of scientific observation and verification.

This is where the polar bears come into play. While environmental activist groups continue to circulate information based on the idea that “human-caused climate change” is a threat to the species, Moore sees a natural, dynamic evolutionary process at work.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2021/10/dont-notice-the-antarctic-temperature-reord/

Last winter, in one of the bleakest places on earth after Canberra and Belushya Guba, a novel hypothesis was proposed by a  rogue researcher in lockdown: the more anthropogenic hot air spoken in the northern hemisphere before a United Nations climate conference, the colder it becomes in the southern hemisphere, especially at the South Pole.

The conjecture has yet to be validated by a peer-reviewed article in Nature Climate Change. Nevertheless, a lot of people – especially the self-appointed guardians of truth who call out “fake news” and “misinformation” — hope it never reaches that learned journal, and certainly not the smartphones or Twitter accounts of apoplectic activists and hysterical weather-worriers. They would prefer it just goes away and does not linger like a bad smell; or is buried deep under Antarctic snow and ice, with or without the perpetrator, before the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) begins in Glasgow-on-Clyde in November, with or without President Xi (editor’s note: Xi isn’t going, preferring to laugh at the participants from a distance.)

Yet the supporting evidence is impressive.

As for the second part, global warming took a long winter vacation, at least in Antarctica.

The Antarctic interior recorded its coldest April-to-September this year since records began in 1957. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), the average temperature at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station was minus 60.9ºC for the six months. It was also the station’s second-coldest winter (June, July and August) on record, with an average seasonal temperature of minus 62.9ºC. This was an extraordinary 3.4ºC below the long-term average (1881-2010) for winter.

Antarctic sea ice extent also was above average for several months.  In late August it was the fifth-highest in the 43-year satellite record. The maximum observed on September 1 was 18.75 million square kilometres (7.24 million square miles, over twice the size of Australia) and the second-earliest seasonal maximum in the satellite record. Ironically, it was “relatively cool” near the North Pole last summer, compared to recent years, which allowed September’s ice extent to be the highest since 2014.

On Thursday, September 30, climatologist Maximiliano Herrera tweeted:

Exceptional cold in the Antarctic Plateau. The Russian Base of Vostok on 30 September dropped to a min. temperature of -79.4C, which is only 0.6C above the world lowest temperature ever recorded in October (recorded at the former Plateau Station, also in Antarctica).

The jury is still out on precisely what caused the cold snap and its significance. According to NSIDC:

the unusual cold was attributed to two extended periods of stronger-than-average encircling winds around the continent, which tend to isolate the ice sheet from warmer conditions. A strong upper-atmosphere polar vortex was observed as well. (NSIDC, October 5, 2021)

https://www.city-journal.org/california-switch-to-primarily-solar-and-wind-powered-grid-is-dead-end

The leaders of California and China have at least one thing in common: fear of blackouts. In late September, following widespread and economically debilitating losses of power, China’s vice premier Han Zheng ordered the country’s energy companies to ensure sufficient supplies before winter “at all costs” and added, ominously, that blackouts “won’t be tolerated.” A month earlier, California governor Gavin Newsom issued emergency orders to procure more natural gas-fired electrical capacity to avoid blackouts. And in a possible sign of more such moves to come, earlier in the summer, California’s electric grid operator “stole” electricity that Arizona utilities had purchased and that was in transit from Oregon.

In recent weeks, the European continent has also suffered blackouts, near-blackouts, and skyrocketing electricity prices triggered by a massive lull in nature’s windiness. Grid operators across Europe rushed to buy fuel and fire up old gas- and coal-fired plants. Europe petitioned Russia for more natural gas, and German coal plants ran out of fuel, causing a scramble (including in China) to get more (doubling global prices). Even long-forgotten oil-fired powerplants were pressed into emergency service on grids from Sweden to Asia.

The issue that’s now front and center is whether all these disruptions to electricity supply and price are, to use Silicon Valley language, a “feature” or a temporary “bug” of the new energy infrastructure favored by advocates of renewables: one dominated by power from the wind and sun. Proponents of this so-called energy transition admit that the road to a post-hydrocarbon world might be rough. But the solution, they say, is to accelerate construction of far more wind and solar machines. Thus, the key question now is not whether we need such a transition, or even what it would cost, but whether it’s even possible in the time frames now being bandied about (“carbon free by 2035”).

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/22/the-wreck-of-the-global-warming-narrative/

Fox News plans to start a 24-hour weather channel, and according to the Guardian, probably the looniest newspaper in Great Britain, “climate crisis researchers worry about the channel’s reach to perpetuate misinformation and advance political goals.” The alarmists actually have more to worry about than that. Their narrative continues to crash into reality.

To start with, how do they explain that three new studies show warming from ​​2001 to 2019 “was driven by increases in absorbed solar radiation, not human emissions”? Sure, the eco-activists will do what they always do: obfuscate, dodge, change the subject, and call out the “science deniers.”

They will do the same when confronted with the news that the last six months were the coldest on record in Antarctica. Just one of those places in a warming world, they say, where it happens to be more frigid than usual. Apparently we’re supposed to forget all that business about the continent, along with the North Pole, being “the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for detection of global warming.”

“As Antarctica holds about 90% of all the ice on the planet, what happens in Antarctica will have major effects on the rest of the world,” Discovering Antarctica, a partnership of organizations that includes the United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office, said some years ago.

More recently we were told that “Antarctica is headed for a climate tipping point by 2060, with catastrophic melting if carbon emissions aren’t cut quickly.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-18-new-york-times-threatens-senator-manchin-with-witchcraft-if-he-obstructs-democrat-climate-agenda

It’s always been just a little odd that the guy the Democrats most need to get on board to get their big transformational plans enacted is Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, while at the same time the centerpiece of those plans is to put the most important industry of West Virginia, coal mining, completely out of business. That sounds like it’s going to be a tough sell. Is there any argument that might convince this guy to get with the program?

In one of the funniest articles I have read anywhere recently, the New York Times thinks that it has come up with the argument that will carry the day: threaten Manchin with witchcraft! The article, covering about half of the front page of yesterday’s print edition, tells Manchin that if he continues to “block” the Democrats’ plans to destroy the coal industry, a spell will be cast over his state and it will be inundated with floods. The headline is “Blocking Climate Plan With Hometown at Risk.”

The Times characterizes Mr. Manchin’s stance thusly:

Mr. Manchin, a Democrat whose vote is crucial to passing his party’s climate legislation, is opposed to its most important provision that would compel utilities to stop burning oil, coal and gas and instead use solar, wind and nuclear energy, which do not emit the carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. Last week, the senator made his opposition clear to the Biden administration, which is now scrambling to come up with alternatives he would accept. Mr. Manchin has rejected any plan to move the country away from fossil fuels because he said it would harm West Virginia, a top producer of coal and gas.

Seems reasonable. Better threaten the guy:

Others say that by blocking efforts to reduce coal and gas use, Mr. Manchin risks hurting his state.

And how exactly would that work? Simple: if Manchin remains intransigent, West Virginia will be destroyed by epic floods.

https://act.sierraclub.org/events/details?formcampaignid=7013q000002FZyvAAG&id=7013q000002FswcAAC&data=2f83cf89f1573457d2d

Are you curious about the ways systemic racism is fueling the climate crisis and how we can each be a part of creating a livable future? We must build a multiracial, intergenerational, cross-class movement to end white supremacy to solve this crisis. Join us! 

RSVP now for a teach-in on Wednesday, October 20, with Allison Chin, former Sierra Club Board President, Hop Hopkins, Sierra Club’s Director of Organizational Transformation, and other Sierra Club leaders from across the country to explore our role in being part of a multiracial, inter generational, cross-class movement to end white supremacy to solve this crisis and further racial and climate justice in our communities.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/the_real_cost_of_government_mandated_wind_and_solar.html

The government and big financial institutions promote a fraudulent analysis of the cost of solar and wind electricity. Their narrative is that wind and solar are competitive with traditional fossil fuels and that the cost of wind and solar is rapidly dropping. Academics and the media amplify and spread the fraudulent analysis.

The basis of the fraud is a simple comparison of the cost per kilowatt hour at the plant fence for electricity produced by wind or solar versus electricity produced by a traditional plant. Some or all of the massive subsidies for wind and solar are ignored in such comparisons. With such a rigged comparison, wind or solar may seem competitive.

A proper comparison reveals that wind or solar are five or even ten times more expensive than natural gas or coal electricity. To understand why this is so, we have to explain some basic facts that apply to either wind or solar.

Wind or solar is erratic, intermittent electricity. It comes and goes according to the supply of wind and sunlight. Wind is erratic from day to day and usually has a seasonal cycle. Sunlight depends on clouds, seasons and of course does not work at night. The consequence is that wind or solar electricity supply must be 100% backed up by conventional electricity plants. If 100% backup is neglected, rolling blackouts are the result when there is a lull in wind or solar production. The lull can be of short duration or seasonal.

Residential rooftop solar is backed up by the connection to the electric utility. The utility has to spend money on generating plants and a distribution network to maintain backup for the residential rooftop system. When rooftop solar is present, the utility is usually undercompensated for providing the backup service. When cloudiness happens over a wide area the backup plants go into high gear. Cloudiness happens even in sunny southern California.

The cost of backup plants for rooftop solar is borne by all the customers of the utility, not just the rooftop solar users that brag about how cheap their electricity is.

Wind or solar have both economies of scale and penalties of scale. The economy of scale results from the massive expansion of the industry. The equipment is cheaper and more efficient. The penalties of scale are more subtle.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/19/u-n-climate-summit-a-meaningless-meeting-of-useless-people/

Later this month, private- and public-sector “leaders” will meet in Glasgow, Scotland. Nearly all will fly to the conference, many in private jets. And what will they talk about? Saving the climate from greenhouse gas emissions, of course.

The United Nations Conference of Parties on ​​climate change, the 26th version of this long-running clown show, starts Oct. 31 and will run through Nov. 12. Media coverage will be both intense and obsequious; attendees, especially the ever-smug John Kerry, “special” climate envoy to the president, will speak in somber tones due to the seriousness at hand; warnings of impending doom will be issued; and absolutely nothing will be accomplished.

This is because there’s nothing to accomplish.

Despite the incessant screeching demands that we must save our planet by severely cutting our greenhouse gas emissions, it’s obvious that man’s impact on the climate is not creating an existential crisis. Every harsh weather event is blamed by activists, politicians, reporters, editors, and celebrities as evidence that anthropogenic global warming is going to destroy Earth.

Of course these are often the same people who tell us we cannot take a single weather event, such as a cold snap or an unusually heavy snow, and extrapolate from that there is no man-made warming. They want man’s greenhouse gas emissions to be an existential crisis.

But they can’t have it no matter how much they want it.

“An existential threat is one that threatens the very existence of mankind. Something that is simply a challenge or an inconvenience is not an existential threat,” explains University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Cliff Mass. “An existential threat must have the potential to undermine the very viability of human civilization.”