John Kerry and Tornadoes – not a good mix
Warren Meyer over at climate-skeptic.com is a bit fired up over the NCDC sponsored, Los Angeles PR firm processed, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. He’s running a series. This is #4. Full report available here: GCCI Government Report
GCCI #4: I Am Calling Bullsh*t on this Chart
For this next post, I skip kind of deep into the report because Kevin Drum was particularly taken with the power of this chart from page 58.
I know that skepticism is a lost art in journalism, so I will forgive Mr. Drum. But in running a business, people put all kinds of BS analyses in front of me trying to get me to spend my money one way or another. And so for those of us for whom data analysis actually has financial consequences, it is a useful skill to be able to recognize a steaming pile of BS when one sees it.
First, does anyone here really think that we have seen a 20-fold increase in electrical grid outages over the last 15 years but no one noticed? Really?
Second, let’s just look at some of the numbers. Is there anyone here who thinks that if we are seeing 10-20 major outages from thunderstorms and tornadoes (the yellow bar) in the last few years, we really saw ZERO by the same definition in 1992? And 1995? And 1996? Seriously? This implies there has been something like a 20-fold increase in outages from thunderstorms and tornadoes since the early 1990’s. But tornado activity, for example, has certainly not increased since the early 1990’s and has probably decreased (from the NOAA, a co-author of the report):
All the other bars have the same believability problem. Take “temperature extremes.” Anyone want to bet that is mostly cold rather than mostly hot extremes? I don’t know if that is the case, but my bet is the authors would have said “hot” if the data had been driven by “hot.” And if this is proof of global warming, then why is the damage from cold and ice increasing as fast as other severe weather causes?
This chart screams one thing at me: Basis change. Somehow, the basis for the data is changing in the period. Either reporting has been increased, or definitions have changed, or there is something about the grid that makes it more sensitive to weather, or whatever (this is a problem in tornado charts, as improving detection technologies seem to create an upward incidence trend in smaller tornadoes where one probably does not exist). But there is NO WAY the weather is changing this fast, and readers should treat this whole report as a pile of garbage if it is written by people who uncritically accept this chart.
Postscript: By the way, if I want to be snarky, I should just accept this chart. Why? Because here is the US temperature anomaly over the same time period (using the UAH satellite data as graphed by Anthony Watts, degrees C):
From 1998 to today, when the electrical outage chart was shooting up, the US was actually cooling slightly!
This goes back to the reason why alarmists abandoned the “global warming” term in favor of climate change. They can play this bait and switch, showing changes in climate (which always exist) and then blaming them on CO2. But there is no mechanism ever proposed by anyone where CO2 can change the climate directly without going through the intermediate step of warming. If climate is changing but we are not seeing warming, then the change can’t be due to CO2. But you will never see that fact in this helpful government propaganda piece.
Well, this ad headed up this post, so I responded as you can imagine 😉
Nottingham Declaration
Signup to the Nottingham declaration and help the climate
http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
ah, shoulda told them about the NIPCC report.
Could it be that the electric utility companies in the last decade invested less in their grid in order to increase their profits? To stay competitive with all those fancy new financial products that offered those high profits? And that led to a worse grid conditions with more outages?
Just a thought.
“TonyS (02:30:57) :
Could it be that the electric utility companies in the last decade invested less in their grid in order to increase their profits? To stay competitive with all those fancy new financial products that offered those high profits? And that led to a worse grid conditions with more outages?
Just a thought.”
Well, the Victorian State Govn’t in Australia solved their maintenace costs, they privatised the utilities in 1999, I think it was. Even less infrastrcuture spending, but higher utility prices. One could suggest that the lack of maintenance could have lead to one of Victorias bush fires as one was started by a downed power line. It has been a disaster for Victorian power consumers, higher prices, no upgrades. And now they are considering re-nationalising power utilities.
Here in New South Wales, the state Govn’t are/were considering selling off utility assets (I suspect wanting to shed the responsibility of carbon taxes from itself on to consumers, one possible reason), the sell off failed. It would be political suicide for them to do that.
There is, apparently, a crisis here along the Murray/Darling rivers. Clmate change is being blamed for the lack of water flowing in the rivers and basin. Never mind that 50,000 farmers draw water from the river systems for irrigation. That changed recent with a federal Govn’t buyback of water rights.
In the UK, Thames Water is owned by MacQuarie Bank (MB), the famous “Millionares Factory” of Australia. Of course MB are extracting all proffits from Thames Water users faster than they can repair infrastructure (Asset stripping).
Bring on the Cap and Trade. Its the best thing that can happen. When people start to hurt there wont be 10 people scrutinising the evidence and data torture but millions. The like of Hanson and Mann better start putting up barricades around their homes.
Anthony
Just another example of how latest government climate report ignores past NOAA findings.
OAA REPORT-REANALYSIS OF HISTORICAL CLIMATE
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY –ES.1, PRIMARY RESULTS AND FINDINGS
[see 2.04. 2009 blogs at WUWT]
Annual, area-average change for the period
1951 to 2006 across North America shows the
following:
• Seven of the warmest ten years for annual
surface temperatures from 1951 to 2006
have occurred between 1997 and 2006.
• Virtually all of the warming since 1951 has
occurred after 1970.
• More than half of this warming is likely
the result of human-caused greenhouse gas
forcing of climate change.
• Changes in ocean temperatures likely explain a substantial fraction of the human caused warming of North America.
[Likely according to their definition means more than 66% probability]
LATEST WHITEHOUSE REPORT
1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)
It would appear that we have gone from global warming in which more than half of this warming is likely [66% or more] human caused but of which changes in ocean temperature likely [ again 66% or more] explain a substantial fraction of the human caused warming in North America. So only 0.66x 0.34= 22% is left as human induced. This is not “primarily human induced”
Also the noted or extra warming period has gone from the 7 very warm or record years during 1997-2006 to back again 50 years of warming between 1959- 2009
Ocean temperatures are not even mentioned anymore
You can make things a lot worse than they really are by how you rewrite the facts.
Not at all unequivocal
One thing to really notice is that the Y-axis is number of incidents. A local thunderstorm and a hurricane would appear to both be one incident. One thunderstorm event might take out power to a few thousand homes (must be some minimum in the reporting level) to a hurricane, even a minor one, that can take out the power to millions of homes.
As suggested by others above, I would not be surprised at all if the level of damage to report an event has not changed over the years.
TonyS (02:30:57) :
‘Could it be that the electric utility companies in the last decade invested less in their grid in order to increase their profits? To stay competitive with all those fancy new financial products that offered those high profits? And that led to a worse grid conditions with more outages?’
Bingo. We have a winner.
That graph – and probably the whole report – is about as believable as the Iranian election result.
Chris
Slightly off topic, but the 6/17/09 Cincinnati Enquirer had a front page article about potential plans of building a new nuclear power plant in Ohio. A sign of sanity maybe? Although still not confirmed (announcements where anticipated on 6/18/09) a lot of state politicians appear to be on board.
Ironically one of the motivations given was the possibility of impending carbon tax. Well, as they say, every cloud does have a silver lining.
Update: another front page article in the Enquirer today (6/18/09), it’s real the Governor and at least 2 members of the US Congress are on board. The Sierra Club did have its usual grossing. This could get interesting.
Re: Dan Evans (20:00:43) :
“Increases in grid disruptions may have more to do with changes in the grid than changes in the climate. Our electric grid has become loaded to maximum capacity. Under present conditions, any type of weather event that causes an outage will more likely to cause a “significant incident” if power is unavailable from elsewhere.”
Great point – I’d like to see that top figure plotted against installed wind-farm capacity for example. The spiky nature of wind generation is a huge problem for the grid.
Some inciteful comments here.
I would like to add that most of the power outages that I have seen have been due to poor maintenance of the local distribution lines. Overgrown rights of way contribute to the downing of lines due to tree limbs at the slightest hint of a breeze or ice and snow. Also aged and unstable power poles help out as well. The electric distribution infrastructure is aging and a lot of it has gone well past its normal service life. That coupled with the utility companies paring their maintenance staffs past the bare bone level is a recipie for disaster. I don’t doubt that the outages are increasing and I don’t doubt that some of it is due to weather. I will maintain, however, that most of these outages could have been averted with proper maintenance. Just my $.02
The data that the chart is based can be found here http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/disturb_events.html
The thing about this type of chart is that it’s meaningless because there’s no perspective…
It could simply be the result of a change in policy for reporting. http://www.doecirc.energy.gov/incidentreporting.html
Could it be that the massive increase in grid-disruptive wind storms is due solely to the increased reliance on wind energy? Using this graph to push the global warming agenda isn’t just wrong, it’s intentionally dishonest. Are people really this naive?
Related to my last comment:
Here’s an excerpt from a 2000 Report http://www.eia.doe.gov/calendar/asa/04132000ASA.doc
When we tell the respondents this, they look at this along with the reporting obligations: Are the surveys mandatory or voluntary? How is EIA proposing to use the data, and why we need it? Then they make a decision on whether or not they are going to report.
From 2007 http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/fednotice/411form.pdf that the huge spike follows this.
It talks about a EIA 411 form that is mandatory for reporting…..Interesting
I’d believe the thunderstorm/lightning as a major cause of disturbance. We’ve had some nasty storms in central Florida, but no tornadoes. This is case of bad grouping. If you put people into categories like this, you would be called an ignorant racist.
So next time the NWS issues a “severe storm warming” I can expect a hurricane, not a thunderstorm to come through? (oops a Goreian slip)
When I was a child, we would have outages that lasted for days and even as long as a week in Wallowa County. We don’t get that anymore. Now the outages are “blink” outages and are more frequent. But certainly less harmful than the days long outages we used to have once or twice a year. Could it be that the reporting has changed because the outages have changed? One outage in 1960 was monstrous compared to one “blink” outage today.
There are other non-weather related alarms that have been sounded in much the same way. For example, we now count many more children having autism than we used to. But then the definition of acceptable levels of autism like behavior has changed. Some folks say that autism rates are increasing because something in the environment is causing it. It is likely due to changes in definition and therefore diagnosis. While there may be truth in an increasing environmental cause, it’s affect would be very small small compared to how we now define and screen children for autism. So too this graph.
Regarding Dave in CA’s posts. There also is a form EIA-417 that each operator is supposed to report. It has changed over time. In 2005 it looks like there were changes specifically geared to clarifying who must report and what type of incidents. If these reports are used for generating the overall reports, they must look at the narrative descriptions of the events because the check off box appears to just be “Weather or Natural Disaster”.
Just when you think sanity might be returning, we get this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=a63vnEwzft94
Where do they get their data? I can’t seem to find it in the article.
If it cost tax dollars to produce this BS chart then those responsible should be sued. Let’s be frank and honest here. There is a lot of money and power being invested in this propaganda and just pointing out the lies does nothing because politicians and mainstream media thinks you taxpayers are just plebs who should be drained of even more money. Until you represent a threat to them, cause someone high profile a major well known embarrassment or sue someone high profile, you are nothing to them. They are sticking their middle finger up at your children and laughing…all the way to the bank with your money.
Steve in SC (07:14:23) :
“I would like to add that most of the power outages that I have seen have been due to poor maintenance of the local distribution lines. Overgrown rights of way contribute to the downing of lines due to tree limbs at the slightest hint of a breeze or ice and snow.”
We moved to the hills of Silicon Valley (where ultility lines are still on poles) some 20 years ago. For the first few years we would have 1-3 significant power outages per winter. Then PG&E went on a campaign of tree trimming in our area, and for the next several years we had zero winter outages.
Pamela Gray (08:49:30) :
“When I was a child, we would have outages that lasted for days and even as long as a week in Wallowa County. We don’t get that anymore. Now the outages are “blink” outages and are more frequent.”
“Tiny tim” tropical storms; “sunspeck” sunspots; “blink” power outages. What’s next? F0.5 tornadoes?
George Bruce (09:55:09) :
Oceans Rising Faster Than UN Forecast, Scientists Say
Where do they get their data? I can’t seem to find it in the article.
They make it up!
Thunderstorms and tornadoes kind of electric things, like sunstorms. Who knows perhaps kind of that lazy “jet stream” NASA found in the sun, but here on earth?.
If terrestrial electromagnetic field (Ap index low) is low then all these atmosphere gadgets (‘terra-spots”) decrease in number. Bad luck for armageddon forecasters.
In some cases it’s due to people and communities not wanting to keep tree limbs clear of the power lines.
A couple years ago in the Seattle area we have a pretty bad wind storm which caused major power outages all over. One community, Woodinville, had refused PSE’s suggestion to remove some trees and radically trim back others to prevent just such a thing. As a result, their power was out a LOT longer than other places which had maintained sensible conservation with respect to trees and power lines.
I followed the link for the data (Footnote 216 in the report). It takes you to this website:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/disturb_events.html
If you follow the links, it appears you can get old reports, but none from the 90s. I clicked on the report from 2000:
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/electricity/epm/02260103.pdf#page=153
There is a table of major outages (Table B1, p. 153). According to the GCCI report, there were a little over 30 weather related outages in 2000 (graph, p.58). However, the report from 2000 lists a total of 30 events (weather and other). Of those 30, I only count 13 listed with a weather cause. Perhaps I am looking at the wrong data?
the big grid disrupting storms were ICE STORMS in the WINTER with extreme cold, that took down trees overgrown over powerlines all over the northeastern US. So, a sign of global cooling, not warming.