From WOOD-TV, Grand Rapids, MI
Chief Meteorologist Bill Steffen has been a familiar face in West Michigan since 1975.MSNBC needs to read Bill’s Blog
MSNBC is running a four-part series entitled Future Earth. On their website they say you can “find out why Earth’s climate machine — the North Pole — is melting alarmingly fast. Learn about our planet’s future, and how you can stop its decline.”
First, the North Pole is not “Earth’s Climate Machine”. There is far more heat and area in the Tropics than at the North Pole.
Second, YOU can’t stop it’s decline (assuming it’s declining)! Nature is big – you personally are insignificant compared to nature. Don’t you wish you had the power to control icecaps! If you don’t mind some profanity, check out George Carlin’s take on “Saving the Planet”.
Third, MSNBC does not know “our planet’s future”. The scenario they portray in this piece is about as remote a possibility in the near future (and more than likely the very far future) as the Lions going 16-0 next season. The Antarctic icecap (which is much bigger than the Arctic icecap) has been growing. In Sept. 1979 (first year of satellite data) the Antarctic icecap was 18.4 million sq. km. In Sept. 2008, the Antarctic icecap was at 19.2 million sq. km. That’s a 30-year trend.
By comparison, Michigan is 151,586 sq. km, so that’s an increase in icecover of over five times the area of Michigan. MSNBC could instead be doing a story on the trend of cooling in Antarctica and possible falling sea levels due to ice accumulation in Antarctica. Keep in mind that if the Polar icecap (without Greenland) melted…it would hardly cause sea level to rise, because the icecap is currently displacing water in the Arctic Ocean. The Antarctic icecap is over a land continent, not floating over an ocean. Significant ice accumulation over the land of Antarctica would cause sea level to fall. The Arctic icecap did decrease significantly (yes, very significantly) from 1979 to 2007. To do a fair piece on Arctic ice…MSNBC or anyone would have to note this. However, to also be fair…they should also tell what’s been going on in the Arctic since 2007.
Please, CHECK OUT THIS GRAPH from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Note that the current icecap has grown significantly and is now much closer to the 1979-2000 average than it is to the low level of 2007. There are meteorological reasons for this increase (PDO – Pacific Decadal Oscillation going negative, etc.) that have nothing to do with CO2. Some scientists predicted there would be no icecap this summer. It’ll actually be bigger than last summer. Al Gore predicted last year that “the icecap will be gone in five years!”. I would be willing to not only bet Al Gore but also give him 100 to one odds that there will still be a polar ice cap in 2013. One last point, MSNBC is owned by General Electric. GE is already making money off the issue with their Carbon Credit Master Card (link from “Treehugger”, no less).
Here’s CNN’s story on the new credit card. Interesting note: In the fourth quarter of 2008 as GE/NBC stock fell 30 percent, GE spent $4.26 million on lobbying — that’s $46,304 each day, including weekends, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In 2008, the company spent a grand total of $18.66 million on lobbying.” Reviewing their lobbying filings, GE’s specific lobbying issues included the “Climate Stewardship Act,” “Electric Utility Cap and Trade Act,” “Global Warming Reduction Act,” “Federal Government Greenhouse Gas Registry Act,” “Low Carbon Economy Act,” and “Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.” Do you think this “big business” is just concerned about the environment?
Well, check out this column from the Politico, which says: “Several of the companies would gain a commercial advantage after a cap and trade was established. General Electric has an “ecoimagination” line of green appliances and equipment. Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard University, said a cap and trade program would be fantastic for GE and other companies that sell products that consume power. He said that if energy costs go up as a result of the regulation — something he believes is likely — a wide array of products from appliances to power plants would become prematurely obsolete and need to be replaced with greener models.” That would mean big money for GE (parent company of NBC and MSNBC). Take a moment and read my previous post on polar ice…check out the graphs and charts…they speak for themselves.
ONE LAST ADD: Check out this website with pictures of submarines in open water at the North Pole. Also: The Weather Channel is now owned by NBC, so they will have a similar policy.
The current (December 2007 dollars) installed capital cost for large wind generation installations is about $2,000/kW. The levelized cost of electricity (taking time value of money into account and O&M costs) is a little over 9 cents/kWh at a capacity factor of 33%. This is unsubsidized.
My electric bill last month (central Ohio) listed generation cost at 5.4 cents/kWh.
I agree that Global Warming is all hype. Isn’t it good on so many levels that we find alternative energy though? I love watching the greenies make fools of themselves. Whatever. There are nice capitalistic and anti-terror benefits from all of this hype. I’m just going to roll with it.
“Isn’t it good on so many levels that we find alternative energy though?”
If it’s competitive with existing sources, yes. But there’s a difference between “finding” alternative energy (which no one argues with) and forcing a massive market change away from what, for now, are cheap and still abundant sources of fossil fuel. Remember, that’s not just oil in the middle east – that is still massive amounts of coal in the USA. What makes sense is to research alternatives, but to continue to use the fossil fuels as long as they remain cheap and abundant, with the alternatives on the shelf to be used when they are needed.
Without getting into the pluses or minuses of political plans, it will be important for policy makers to remember that every dollar pulled out of the economy to enforce an uneconomic change in energy supply will be a dollar that is not available for health care or any of the other plans currently in vogue. And don’t believe the nonsense about “green” energy creating jobs – unless you’re going to hire a million people to sit on foot powered bicycle generators, that just ain’t gonna happen. By elminating jobs in the oil, natgas, and coal industries, “green” energy plans will always be a net job loser, not a job creator.
“Impactful” x 7 : The inverted socialist pyramid.
…-
“The Environmental Inverted Pyramid”
“The further we get out from the individual, however, the more impactful people think climate change will tend to be: more impactful on their families than themselves; more impactful on their communities than their families; more impactful on their country than their communities; more impactful than other counties than on the United States; more impactful on future generations than the present one, and finally, more impactful on plants and animals than on humans.”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2239572/posts
What defies logic is the notion that GE or any purported Cap N’ Trade pirate must have “carbon” legislation in place to make their nefarious profits. There have always been and remain today, three compelling reasons for energy conservation:
1) The U.S. sends $700B annually overseas for foreign oil.
2) Providing defense/security for foreign oil access costs additional $billions$.
3) Dependence on foreign energy is a major *national security* concern.
A fourth, slightly less compelling (for skeptics) reason is the benefit to environment. A first year biz school student could devise a marketing plan around these three reasons to buy energy saving appliances/services. Want to go green? Add the fourth reason. Not rocket science.
It should be abundantly clear that the “carbon tax” schemes are simply taxes to finance social programs like nationalized health care, banks and your once-favorite fruit stand.
James P (02:52:05) OT ocean acidification
Try this: http://co2science.org/education/reports/corals/corals.php
[You have a choice of download formats. I used pdf. ]
By Craig D. Idso
“CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs: Prospects for the Future”
Not exactly what you want but there are pages of references.
“Pamela Gray (07:02:43) : …they have no choice but to toe the line.”
” Just Want Truth… (07:11:08) : “. . .Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.” ~~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”
E.O. WIlson on Francis Bacon: “Beware, he said, of the idols of the mind, the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall. They are the real distorting prisms of human nature. Among them, idols of the tribe assume more order than exists in chaotic nature; those of the imprisoning cave, the idiosyncrasies of individual belief and passion; of the marketplace, the power of mere words to induce belief in nonexistent things; and of the theater, unquestioning acceptance of philosophical beliefs and misleading demonstrations.” in Consilience.
OT
Whoever it was that said Andy Revkin at the NYT was fair and objective, think again:
Deliberate misrepresentation:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/04/deliberate_misrepresentation.html
Speaking of windmills:
“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
Love the “as likely as the Lions goinig 16-0 next yr” analogy! A true Michigan man!
@ur momisugly John F. Hultquist (22:58:31) :
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?
Bill Marsh (08:07:57) : the 79-2000 average (I’m still puzzled as to why NSIDC uses that time frame as the metric.).
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.]
Now it comes GHG desguised under volcanic clothes:
http://filebox.vt.edu/artsci/geology/mclean/Dinosaur_Volcano_Extinction/pages/studentv.html
Jason S. – I find it difficult to “roll with it”. The United States’ current economical stress point is close to the proverbial straw that breaks it. We are currently experiencing a temporary reprieve in global oil costs. Now, more than any foreseeable time to come (as I see it), is the time to slap the crap out of chicken little (stamp out this false green initiative), go full bore with domestic coal and oil avenues, and, as WWS advises above, use this time to slowly grow and replace these carbon based sources. Not because of the false notion they contribute toward the inevitable demise of mankind, but because they will not last forever. It has been projected that for every dollar gained in green technology jobs looses three in another sector. No bull. Just fact. Anyone interested in the facts….. visit:
http://www.petitionproject.com/gw_article/GWReview_OISM150.pdf
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…?
Are you the one who is “if we keep turning the temperature of the Earth up,”?
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
Maz2
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
With respect to the comments on Wind generation above by Claude Harvey (06:31:18) and James P (08:20:51) . . . .
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 grew up watching him on TV in Grand Rapids. Nice to see another TV meteorologist stand up for what he thinks. I hope he doesn’t get reprimanded for it.
Graeme Rodaughan (23:53:47) :
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.
This is related to one of Bill Steffens points
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
Stan W (06:17:15) :
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
Hope you find what you’re looking for, and post up your results with a link. I’d be interested too.
Bill P.