Expert forecaster sees Putin’s moves with energy as a power play in anticipation of global cooling 20-30 years out.
By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
1/6/2009 8:23:25 PM
It’s not often that meteorology intersects with geopolitics – but Europe could be in store for another Cold War, literally.
Accuweather.com’s chief long-range and hurricane forecaster Joe Bastardi observed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent cut of gas flows to Europe via Ukraine may have been done so in anticipation of a global cooling cycle on the Jan. 6 “Glenn Beck Show” radio program. Bastardi has a solid reputation among Wall Street traders for understanding weather’s impact on energy commodities.
“The thing I want to bring up here – very interesting – most of the solar cycle studies that we know about and that guys like me read have come out of the Russian scientists,” Bastardi said. “But when Glasnost developed, the Russian scientists, a lot of their ideas on the coming cool period that a lot of us believe is going to occur – ice, rather than fire is the big problem down the road here 2030, 2040, and the reversing cyclical cycles of the ocean – it came out of the East.”
According to Bastardi – Putin is relying on the data from the Russian scientists and wants to bring some European nations to their knees by exploiting their reliance on natural gas when the weather is at its coldest.
“Now my theory – something that I put out and it’s something that’s not something that people want to hear is that Putin knows what is going to happen – or he believes the same way I do about the overall climate pattern. So, if you control the pipeline into Europe, you literally can control Europe without firing a shot – if you control the energy.”
Bastardi cited former President Ronald Reagan’s 1982 Cold War-era staunch resistance to a then-$10 billion pipeline that was proposed to deliver natural gas 3,500 miles from Siberia to the heart of Western Europe, as a July 12, 1982 Time magazine article pointed out. Reagan’s stance was criticized by Western Europe Cold War allies and was said to be “riding roughshod over Western Europe’s economies,” by Time.
Bastardi also noted Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 was evidence of Putin’s willingness to use energy as a strategic tactic, since the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, located in Georgia, transports about a million barrels of oil a day from the Caspian Sea through Georgia to ports in Turkey – and then throughout Europe.
“That is why Reagan was so dead set against the Europeans looking east for their energy,” Bastardi said. “And now we’re seeing it. I believe the invasion of Georgia was nothing more than saying, ‘Hey I can take that pipeline whenever I want’ and he shut the gas off to the Ukraine when it got brutally cold.”
In a follow-up interview with the Business & Media Institute, Bastardi explained that a lot of Putin’s personality traits are at play here – that he is using intelligence, going back to his days as at the KGB.
“The weather’s most certainly involved in this,” Bastardi said. “If look at what those Russian scientists, where a lot of these studies on it getting cold come from – you can see that, what makes you think that Putin doesn’t have some knowledge of that? Here’s the head of the KGB – and forever what you want to say, I’m sure he’s privy to the same kind of information the head of the CIA is privy to here about studies and what people are thinking on a scientific nature.”
And according to Bastardi, Putin’s use of the flow of energy into Europe is just one of the weapons in his arsenal of tactics that he, as the head of Russia, has perfected using – comparing him to a wrestler with a perfected move.
“He’s definitely a type-A alpha male and we can both agree on that,” Bastardi said. “I mean look at him and he is more likely to use weapons – and I use weapons in terms of for instance a wrestler – a single-leg take down is a weapon. If you perfect it, you can use it the entire match. He’s more likely in the art of war to use what he knows how to use, even if it’s only two or three things than try to go use something he doesn’t know how to use or try to create something – that’s a waste of time to use it.”
It’s not a personality fault Bastardi contended on Beck’s program – but just what he considers proper for his country.
“And so, there are a couple of things that line up here that indicate the guy is trying act on behalf of his country and what he believes his country should be,” Bastardi said. “And I believe that he wants to use nature, rather than change nature and that may be what’s going on over here.”
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ecarreras (09:42:23)
Yes, Ehrlich wont let go. Like all those with an over inflated ego they have to continue to the death to push their point of view, even though it’s been shown to be totally wrong.
Sam the Skeptic (03:10:52) :
… the Soviet Union was always prepared to use the idealistic left in the west for its own purposes and, boy, were they ever prepared to be “used”!
I think the phrase you want is “useful idiots.” They’re still useful, and they’re still idiots.
Russia (in its incarnation as the USSR) had its run in with bad science under Stalin. They may still remember the disastrous outcome of “Lysenkoism,” and it wouldn’t surprise me if they recognized its reincarnation in the AGW crowd. Nations have interests, and I’d be shocked if the Russians didn’t try to advance theirs by taking advantage of the West’s contemporary version of Lysenkoism.
Phil:
I wonder how many wind turbines have been installed in Russia.
My guess is, at most, not many.
Anyone know?
Off topic. Continued cold forecast. Twenty Years Worth. http://co2sceptics.com/attachments/database/Weather%20Action%20PDF%20Download%207th%20January%202009__0__0__1231348627.pdf
Cheers, Ed.
Roger Sowell:”” The staggering cost of new nuclear power: A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour — triple current U.S. electricity rates.”
I am going to venture a WAG that a good portion of the staggering cost is due to over the top permitting and “safety” regulations imposed by government at the insistance of anti-nukers, greenies and, yes, the oil, gas & coal companies. A little story about my brother in Connecticut who had researched putting up a windmill on his residential property many years ago. He can across a “safety” regulation that required an additional 50 feet of clearance past the height of the windmill on all sides just in case it fell down. This “safety” regulation effectively prohibiited windmills from being placed on most residential properties. I have no doubt that it was passed into law by power companies to prevent individuals from producing their own supplemental power.
David Porter (09:58:30) :
Granted that Ehrlich is a Malthusian chicken little with appalling forecasting accuracy. What I found interesting about the paper (not written by Ehrlich) was that they concluded that war frequency increased with “cooling” rather than “warming.”
I happened to come across (thank David Icke) this from Peter Taylor on YouTube. I hope Peter you don’t mind me putting this up. It may help people see where you are coming from as to my understanding of both this site and yourself you are not so different in outlook http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLR95w0qBD0 and http://www.changingtimes.org.uk/Lectures/PeterTaylor/PeterTaylor.htm you can get the lecture just down from top right on this page. All the best, Ed.
They don’t need to modify the readings. They only need to delete any extremely low readings from the data provided to NOAA. This has been a consistent question raised at Climate Audit; why are the data provided to NOAA from Russia missing so many readings when complete sets of data are available elsewhere.
When there is a missing value provided to NOAA, a “fill” value is created using “averages” of other values. If the missing value was an anomalously low value, the calculated “fill” value is likely to be higher and the average raised over what it would have been had the actual value been in the data.
So nobody needs to change anything, you only need to “accidentally drop” a value (oopsie!) in order to raise the reported temperatures. If you always include anomalously high values and randomly drop anomalously low values, you can eventually walk the “averages” up to a warmer temperature than the reality.
Complete data sets that seem in agreement with the partial data that NOAA gets appear to be readily available for download on the Internet. Weather Underground has more complete data for stations in Russia than NOAA gets from their “official” sources.
I have raised the issue in an oblique way on Climate Audit by stating that I was surprised that nobody had attempted to re-run the grid plots using a more complete data set simply out of idle curiosity to see if the missing data points made any difference. I don’t have the skill set required to do it.
Putin once half-jokingly said (to paraphrase):
I welcome Global Warming – Russia has a huge territory and much of it is permafrost, a bit of warming is actually good for Russia. Besides, Russians will be spending less money on fur.
As someone who lived in Russia for more then 20 years, I would say that the latest beef that Russia has is with Ukraine, not Europe. Russia’s economy very much depends on the oil and gas exports and I don’t believe Putin and his KGB buddies are stupid enough to severe the umbilical cord that feeds their bank accounts or jeopardize the flow of money.
The difference between the USSR bureaucrats and the Putin’s gang is that they can freely spend their loot now and, boy, do they have a lot of it. And, they don’t want to loose the ability to continue milking the “gas” cow (EU). They doing what they are doing out of the necessity (Ukraine’s debt is about $3B), and not some grand plan to test the economic and political power play (it doesn’t hurt either in the process but it’s not the main reason).
Excuse my
The reality in Balcans is very different and difficult to be understudied. Ucraina desire not to pay the russian gases like on stranger, but not belong to russian friends.
Like another country Romania, Ucraina speak like un enemy and desire to be allowed to russian methane gas.
Geomarz,
Yes, I believe there is more to the situation than meets the eye. On one hand Ukraine talks about kicking the Russian Navy out of Sevastopol yet on the other hand wants gas as if it were still a Soviet Republic. I believe an reasonable agreement has been reached today with international monitors watching the gas delivery. I hope all goes well.
Tom in Florida (10:20:26) : re extra costs imposed by anti-nuke groups.
Yes, no doubt that was the case in the 70’s, and 80’s in the U.S. The energy regulating agency changed the process as new knowledge was gained.
However, the U.S. has streamlined the application process. Even so, the cost projections for new 1000-MWe Westinghouse AP is $8 to $9 billion. A twin-reactor plant at 2200 MWe was recently published as costing $17 billion in Florida. Note that Westinghouse says they cost only $1 billion for 1000 MWe.
see http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2008/08/more-on-nuclear-power.html
What I predict will happen in the next round of U.S. nuke building (If it ever happens) is the delays from lawsuits will at least double these published costs. The lawyers are much better, and have more laws (causes of action) to use.
This is why, IMHO, engineers and capitalists are working so very hard on alternatives. Nukes are just not in the picture where they are not subsidized by governments.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
What a load of drivel. When oil prices were going up, Russia was getting money hand over fist, and the economic situation was getting remarkably better. People in Russia were looking to a brighter future, and were thus quite happy.
Since the rapid drop in crude oil prices, Russia is hurting for money, and the economic situation has been getting much worse. Russians are getting most unhappy, and getting restless as a result.
Russia therefore needs money. Russia furnishes a good bit of the energy that Europe uses, and energy which Europe can’t do without. Russia can easily control more than twice the amount of energy that Russia furnishes to Europe. The Russians have tanks right next to their borders with Ukraine and Georgia. Thus, Russia is capable of shutting off well more than half of the energy sources which Europe can’t do without.
Russia needs the money . . . and Europe will end up paying, as Europeans have no choice at all to do otherwise.
It is all about money.
Reagan, the simple-minded cowboy, figured out before the rest of us mental giants that the Soviets could not be beaten militarily, but could be defeated economically. And so it happenned.
The Russians learnt that lesson the hard way, they aren’t stupid, and they don’t want to re-learn it. If the U.S. and E.U. continue to depend on foreign sources for the greater part of their energy needs, the energy exporters will control them economically, perhaps do already. But, as much as the conspiracy theorist’s would like it to be true, it’s not in any fossil-fuel energy exporter’s best interests to promote the CO2/AGW scare. It would result in lessening dependence on foreign sources.
Roger Sowell,
Now that China has ordered several of those Westinghouse plants and made them their standard plant for inland nuclear power, I would expect the cost per plant to drop dramatically. There are a dozen plants that I am aware of that have received licenses in the US. China wants to have at least 100 under construction within the next decade or so. That will dramatically reduce per-plant costs.
I read a funny article yesterday about an environmental group that brought a lawsuit that said that delays from lawsuits will increase costs well beyond the plan. Well DUH! We need to stop these idiotic lawsuits. We need a way for government to cut through the frivolous obstruction and get these plants built. There is nothing environmentally friendly about being anti-nuclear. It is political. They obstruct every single energy project, every single infrastructure project, every single development project. It is now cheaper for cities to allow infrastructure to rot in place than to repair it. Waiting for a hurricane, flood, or earthquake to destroy a bridge, and then use emergency authority to replace it is cheaper for cities than to attempt to repair the infrastructure without an emergency because of idiotic regulations that mean well but in practice are costing us billions of dollars in unnecessary funding of six layers of studies, a legal team, and years of litigation for no reason.
One of the things that struck me in this thread was the price that is being paid for gas via Russia. It seems low in comparison to the price I pay for my domestic gas. First of all I need to explain that I live in the UK and our domestic gas price is based on KWHrs at 3.69p. Therefore a cubic metre of gas becomes:
3.69 x 31.6 = 116.6cu ft x 35.315 =4117.9p/cubic metre
That’s£41.18 cub metre.
At an exchange rate of 1.5$/£ this becomes: $61 77/cub metre.
And therefore by my calculations I pay $61,768/1000 cub metres.
That’s compared to $270/1000 cub metres. Two hundred and twenty nine times more expensive than wholesale prices.
Somebody please tell me I’m wrong.
Sorry Charles if I gave the wrong impression.
I was merely pointing out that [potential cheating strategy deleted again, even if innocently rephrased ~ charles the moderator]
My impression of this blog is that it is represented by highly professional and moral users and I do not believe that WUWT will have any trouble winning in its own right.
Freezing Finn (04:17:13) :
“Ron de Haan (02:15:53) :
“…In the mean time GAZPROM raised the prices to 250 dollar for 1000 cubic meter of gas.”
Yes, and for obvious reasons”.
freezing Finn,
I just provided an (as good as) objective report on a televised interview with a GAZPROM representative in Germany so don’t eat me.
My personal opinion is that you are right in regards to the international market prices for gas that should be paid by any customer.
I do not think the Russians are out to destroy their business relationship with Europe, their biggest customer.
Gazprom lately has taken interests in energy companies all over Europe serving European consumers directly and they would cut in their own hand if a gas shortage destroys their end user relations.
In the mean time, due to the financial crises, gas prices coupled to oil prices have dropped sharply.
It could be that Ukraine is out to settle the bill based on today’s prices but that is all speculation.
Even France is reported to be affected from gas shortage just now as they shiver under a blanket of snow and icy winds reaching from Belgium over Paris and all the way down to subtropical Marseille.
@shawn Whelan (08:49:03) :
Freezing Finn
You must have never heard of the Red White war in Finland or the Winter war. Wonderful neighbours those Russians.
Thanks for the remark. You see, not only the Freezing Finn, but me too (a Pole, from Poland) do not have to be Russophobes just because we have gotten tangled or tough relations with our neighbour in the past. I would rather put the past where it belongs and start to make good trade with Russians than to show forward our national wounds every time Russia is going to be discussed.
Having said that I would like to thank Freezing Finn and Peter Taylor for their posts. It happens too often that Mr Putin is seen as KGB officer not as a Statesman caring for His country and Russian Nation. I’d like to have Mr Putin as Head of Polish State, really!
For those who would like to get acquainted a little more with Russia I suggest to read my posts called Understanding Russia. They can be found on my blog The New Slavs Media.
Thanks to all for the excellent discussion!
Best regards
crosspatch (12:10:33) : re Costs will drop dramatically..
No doubt. As one example, India’s Reliance Industries just built and started a huge refinery costing $3.5 billion. That refinery in the U.S. would cost $10 billion.
China very well may build 1000 MWe nuclear plants at $1 billion each. Those are clever guys — I know, I worked there twice in my engineering capacity. But in the U.S., that is not going to happen IMHO.
And I completely agree with your infrastructure statements. It has been sad to watch California’s infrastructure progress (or lack of same) in the past 25 years.
Now the problem is even worse, as state unemployment zooms, the budget deficit balloons to unpredented levels, employers leave the state, workers leave the state, and the government raises taxes to compensate. The state has a few infrastructure projects in progress, and is shutting them down incomplete due to lack of funds. Re-start costs will be huge.
It reminds me of a sad scene I saw in a harbor in Brazil 20 years ago. A cross-harbor bridge for vehicle traffic was left un-finished, just rusting away. I thought at the time, How sad, but how typical for a struggling third-world country. I never imagined I would see the same 20 years later in the U.S.A.!
And California is not alone. Michigan’s economy is seriously hurting. Minnesota has bridges collapse without warning.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
1) There was an energy and climate analysis created for British government a few years ago. I can’t recall the name and the date. But there were suggestions to build more nuclear plants to be ready for the frosty future. Can anyone point to the document? I tried to find it but to no avail.
2) And one point on Ukraine. That state was created from nowhere. Germany, UK, Poland and many European countries were being build from scratch – went thru industrial, social, and political development. NOT Ukraine. In one snap of Fortune’s twist it came into being having gigantic (military) and modern (space) industry for nothing. With Russian population. Mr Putin was right when he once said to Mr Bush that “Ukraine is even not a state”.
There are to areas on the map Russia will NEVER allow to be marked NATO country – Ukraine and Georgia. It is in her national and live interest not to allow the black scenario to happen. The sooner it is to be understood the better we will understand Russia and Mr Putin.
Re nuclear power plants in the U.S.:
A quote from a commenter to the July 21, 2008, Wall Street Journal, Mr. R. L. Hails Sr., P.E.
“Having engineered two score nuclear power plants, I find this article misses the essential fact, as does both Presidential candidates. The professionals who would build Senator McCain’s proposed forty five nuclear power plants do not exist. The engineers who designed the last nukes were the cream of US engineers, typically were in the top ten percent of their graduating class. They are dead. I once surveyed my group, in the 1970’s, some 100 +, and found the average degree level was 2.6. But during the 1980s, 69 engineering schools dropped the coursework which the industry considered vital to this profession. Their graduates could not find work. The US has no Confederate veterans; we have no experienced nuclear power engineers, those who built the world’s most complex technology. The primary source of engineering talent is Japan, China, India, and France. This is just one of a host of non existent capabilities. The US’ capability to fabricate a one foot thick pressure vessel, over 1000 tons, to nuclear standards, is non-existent. Japan may be able to make one per year for us.
If the New York Yankees, indeed the entire league, had not played a game in thirty five years, would any one expect a competent all star game? No. Why would anyone envision that hundreds of thousands of highly skilled professionals will arise from a national secondary school system that ranks almost dead last, globally, in science and math? Any US nuclear power renaissance will face investment difficulties, but the show stopper will be experienced talent. This technology was created by the brightest minds on earth, but they have faded into history. There are engineering books in the library, as there are books explaining how to hit a major league home run. No nation has ever restarted a state of the art profession. There will be delays, disasters, and overruns, which will not be pretty. If some hero tries to fast track the resurgence, he will cause a nuclear train wreck.”
source: http://forums.wsj.com/viewtopic.php?t=3381
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
@roger Sowell
I found interesting text what it is to build nuclear reactor in the USA. The article was entitled A Tale of Two Reactors.
BTW The old hyperlink is wrong. The correct one:
New American: A Tale of Two Reactors, Written by Ed Hiserodt, Monday, 07 July 2008 02:48
Regards
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