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.
Why do they only show the aggregate of all effects? Why not show them separately? It looks to me like the “trend” is entirely due to windstorms and hurricanes….Look at temperature extremes-I don’t see any increase in the purple only, or light blue…or beige. Maybe some wildfire, and maybe some “undefined”…whatever that is.
went to the eia forms linked above and looked at this year to date. Some of the incidents involved 1 customer, Some 100,000s but quite the mix. A much better indicator than number of incidents would be total customers or total power in megawatts.
Re: maintenance. I have traveled to Jamaica. The power lines there snap regularly because of moss build-up on the lines. If there ever was a country fraught with poor maintenance of roads and other form of infrastructure it is that island. Much of their infrastructure was put into place by countries that “owned” them. Once they declared their independence, they were left to govern themselves and build infrastructure maintenance for infrastructure they did not create. Consequently the roads and wires are a patchwork of repaired and monkey-rigged sections that often fail in light of poor conditions and heavy storms. If we are not careful, we could be walking in their shoes with our own roads and wires.
“Mike Lorrey (12:05:29) :
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.”
Some ice-storm produced power outages are a result of warmer temperatures. If an area that normally gets snow warms a little and gets ice instead. In areas that constantly get ice, most of the trees have already lost most of their vulnerable branches. Area that are normally colder may have a lot more tree damage from an equivalent ice storm.
I did look at the data for the plot for the years 2002 to 2006 and the number of incidents increases a lot more than either the total power out or the number of customers affected. Both went up because not much was reported in 2002. But both power and customers peaked in 2004 while the number of incidents kept increasing. It would have to be looked at in great detail but my guess is more things are being reported that may have been skipped in previous years.
Also the numbers are meaningless. One incident could mean 1 customer or the entire island of Puerto Rico. The 1 customer could be one house, or PP&G.
I’ll take back the one house for an incident. The standard is to report over 100 MW, plus other things that could be smaller if they effect the national grid, like vandalism and fuel shortages. Many of the reported events are much smaller than 100 MW though.
I have lived in Oklahoma City for 20 years. Last year and this year we have had a sharp decrease in Tornado activity.JS
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) maintains consistently defined major U.S. grid disturbances statistics. This data shows major grid disturbances declining since 2002. The total number of major U.S. electric grid disturbances by year are as follows: 2002 – 24, 2003 – 23, 2004 – 19, 2005 – 15, 2006 – 12, 2007 – 15, 2008 – 15. This NERC data is far superior in quality and consistency than the mystery data contained in this propaganda climate fear junk article.
Larry, The data in the report is not a mystery, you can look up the source data, it just has no meaning as far as climate change in concerned. The data behind the plot at least for 2002 to 2006 also showed drops in the amount of power interruptions for all causes. It was the total count that went up a lot. So lots more smaller incidents are getting reported than in the past.
Gee, has anyone thought to correlate the increase in weather related grid disturbances with the increase in wind power capacity?
hmmm if I followed their links right the origonal sits at
http://www.globalchange.gov/
Weird .. I didnt even know such a site existed.. its frothy koolaid
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Residential ‘drops’ (lines dropped from the power pole/transformer to the a residence or business) may be insulated, but I don’t recall ever seeing any distribution or HV Transmission lines being ‘coated’ with any material …
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Hmmm …
a) actual ‘grid’ collapses or –
b) simple loss of residential distribution lines due to tree entanglement?
The later, I would think.
Technically, you’re not really part of the ‘grid’ once out on one of the ‘spokes’ of the wheel (speaking of the topology) and into the ‘distribution’ part of the network (past the substation). Substations are/can be fed via one or more HV Transmission lines and this is where ‘the gird’ aspect can begin to come into play (more than one feed, feeds in parallel from several generations centers, ties/interties between different control areas, etc)
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Perusing through some of the reports, plans, reliability reports on the NERC website, I would say that is not quite the case, and maybe not even close, but I might be challenged to support that contention so won’t go quite that far.
New routes/Transmission lines *have* been proposed *and* built.
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Evan Mills defends his graph!!!!
http://eetd.lbl.gov/EMills/pubs/grid-disruptions.html
Not an example of confirmation bias. This is an example of confirmation BLINDNESS. He can’t see the unreliability of the data when it’s staring him in his face.