Bob S. (10:18:53) :

Can anyone direct me to a site, or expound on their own, a comparative study on mankind’s contribution to greenhouse gasses since the dawn of the industrial age (or since he made fire)…. vs. the contribution of just one volcanic eruption such as Mount Saint Helens. Further…. how many contributing volcanic incidents estimated take place throughout the ocean floor never witness by man (if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is there to hear…..). Can mankind truly be so vain and foolish not to recognize their insignificance in the matter…?

Hope you find what you’re looking for, and post up your results with a link. I’d be interested too.

Bill P.

for Allan M R MacRae

The E.ON report that you referenced was referenced here last year…

Hi Stan,

I’ve posted E.ON’s report several times, and perhaps others have as well – it is the best publicly-available document I’ve seen, and clearly states the problems with wind power, if anyone cares to read it.

At the risk of sounding cynical, Ted Turner is now a big ‘fan’ of wind power – and I hope he invests his entire fortune in it.

Regards, Allan

http://www.comcast.net/articles/news-science/20090406/SCIENCE-US-ANTARCTICA-ICE/

In a nutshell – the west Antarctic ice shelf has shrunk by another and alarming 700 sq miles according to the article and makes no bones in attaching blame to AGW.

Vetning – but please read: the media trumpets this all day. The occasional skeptic pops up, says his/her piece and that’s it. What’s frustrating for me is that I am back in college after a career in the military. The kids at these schools are inundated by speakers who spout the CO2-induced global warming line – and they are eating it up lock stock and barrel. I see NO ONE, anywhere, who counterbalances this losing trend in these so-called insitutions of higher learning. The colleges and universities officially support the consensus view as well.

From my point of view, we who are skeptical are confined to websites, preaching to each other, all the while we are losing the battle everywhere else. I’m a neophyte at this subject, but i have enough grounding in science to understand that what “they” are proposing is …very unlikely. So who speaks for and to the generation of kids (voting age ones) who have been completely indoctrinated in this pseudo-religion? I’ve been swimming against the tide – solo. It’s been very hard.

Rant off

GE is the new Dupont, with CO2 tag teaming Freon.

REF: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/blackstock5.html

Interpretation: GE wants to make $$$ from the “control of CO2″. It’s not about saving the environment, planet earth, civilization, humanity, or whatever – it’s the profit motive in all it’s glory.

Nothing wrong with making a profit – but does it have to be at the expense of the US Consumer who is being (will be) legally blocked from purchasing cheaper, more reliable, fossil fuel power.

The match up between GE and Duponts tactics (see Ref) is pretty much spot on. Use the legal system to outlaw your competition, achieve monopoly prices, sh@f#t the end consumer, and lock in mega-profits for a generation.

Don’t you just love the naive environmentalists who just don’t get it.

Graeme, I agree entirely with the sentiment you are expressing, but I have a small quibble with your choice of words. I think what GE is attempting cannot fairly be characterized as profit-seeking, but rather rent-seeking. In a free market this sort of scheme would collapse quickly under the weight of its bogus underlying premises. The only way it succeeds is if people are forced to pay into the scheme through government coercion. Therefore what GE is seeking is not profit generated through genuine economic activity which provides goods and services which the market place demands. Instead it is seeking a government license to act as a highwayman, leeching economic vitality from productive members of society with no thought of doing anything constructive themselves.

It is not enough to consider “capacity factor” when considering the capital requirements for grid operation based on large scale use of wind or solar.

If wind, for example, has a 30% capacity factor (vs, say, 90% for a base load fossil plant) it is not enough to say, “well, we’ll just have to install 3X our load requirements.”

Remember, that 30% capacity factor doesn’t mean that one of our three turbines will be running at any given time – it means that over the course of a year, 8,760 hours, that 2MW turbine may deliver 5,200 MWh of electric energy.

So first, we need to make a strategic decision on how to handle (or not handle) load in excess of what the wind can provide:

1) We can invest in large energy storage facilities like “hydro pumped storage” or compressed air that can take the excess when all three turbines are running full out.

This seems to be the favorite of many “Green’s” but it takes land and would be costly. Worse, since the wind might not blow for days, you might need 4X wind capacity (and 4X transmission capability) to run a wind-based grid).

2) We can back up all the wind generation with fossil capability which means 3X wind + 1X fossil.

This is kind of what we’re doing today ‘cause there’s so little wind-based generation capacity, existing reserves can handle the situation when the wind is not blowing or the sun not shining. But if the Green’s ambitions are realized, we will run out of reserve and then, under this strategy we’d be forced to invest in additional fossil generation to back up the wind.

3) We can simply not meet demand requirements when users turn on their lights, motors, TVs, computers, etc.

We occasionally read about places where this is practiced more-or-less; you know, California in the ‘90s with rolling blackouts or Baghdad today with electricity about 12 hours/day. Just remember such examples are never offered as examples of environmental excellence but of pathology of one sort or another. Indeed, it probably wrong to think of this as a “strategy;” more accurately, this approach is a consequence of a failed energy management strategies.

Indeed, this is my biggest worry — that our leaders might not realize that even “green jobs,” building wind turbines in Iowa, for example, won’t be possible without a reliable supply of affordable energy.

Point is that in response to the earlier comments, it is not enough to think about the turbines, and $/KW – you can start with capacity factor but reliable, efficient electric grid operation depends on much more.

I note that Al Gore is in tromsoe preparing for the forthcoming climate summit. This is the link to the Universitry weather site.
http://weather.cs.uit.no/

Anthony

If you click on ‘about’ you will see a picture of their weather station. It appears to be on decking-what do you make of it?

tonyb

It’s getting worser and worser than the “experts” previous “worst-case scenarios”: “worse than the worst-case scenarios presented by experts a few years ago.”

Silly. Turn it down.
Goreacle “pleads” for Gaia’s sake.

Goreacle explains: “if we keep turning the temperature of the Earth up, then the heat will go to lower depths of the Arctic Ocean and it will be impossible for the ice to come back.”"

That’s enough of the inverted manbearpig forever.
…-

“Gore pleads for rapid action to halt ice melt

Nobel prize climate champion and former US vice president Al Gore called Tuesday for rapid action to prevent the potentially irreversible melting of the planet’s ice, just months before a UN climate summit.

Speaking at the first conference devoted to melting ice, held in the Norwegian town of Tromsoe ahead of the UN meeting in Copenhagen in December, Gore warned that the situation was worse than the worst-case scenarios presented by experts a few years ago.

“This conference is a global wake-up call,” Gore said, adding: “The scientific evidence for action in Copenhagen in December is continuing to build up week by week.”

He explained why the melting ice posed such a threat to the planet.

“Ice is important through the ecological system of the Earth for many reasons, but one of them has to do with its reflexivity,” he said.

Ice reflects 90 percent of the sun’s radiation back into the atmosphere. If the ice were to melt, the dark water would not reflect the heat but instead absorb it, thereby accentuating the effect of global warming.

“As it disappears we have to keep in mind that it can come back only if we act fairly quickly,” said Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He explained that “if we keep turning the temperature of the Earth up, then the heat will go to lower depths of the Arctic Ocean and it will be impossible for the ice to come back.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2239707/posts

http://www.petitionproject.com/gw_article/GWReview_OISM150.pdf

Because it is internationally agreed on practice to report “normals” with years ending in “0” [and for 30 years, when data is available]. Expect a new “normal” or average, if you like, after the 2010 data becomes available. [I did a longer comment on this on a previous thread. The conference out of which this practice came was held in Warsaw in 1935; if I remember correctly.]

I have never understood why some people put so much emphasis on the ice that forms in the Arctic Ocean. WUWT has had several threads on this issue and no one has offered an explanation. In all cases when the issue of an “ice free” Arctic is raised, my thought is “So what? Like a bad weed, it keeps coming back”

That’s an interesting take. Let’s say the Arctic ice cap is melting. Would only bad things happen if it melted entirely? Might there be some benefit if the North Pole is navigable for commercial traffic? Are the climate changes all going to be bad?

“Britain’s only wind turbine plant to close
Vestas is to shut down its Isle of Wight factory in the face of collapsing demand from a wind-farming industry hobbled by the recession and red tape
• Tim Webb
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 28 April 2009 13.13 BST
• Article history
The UK’s only wind turbine manufacturing plant is to close, dealing a humiliating blow to the government’s promise to support low-carbon industries.”
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/apr/28/vestas-wind-turbine-factory-close