NCAR's dirty little secret

The wind turbines are already nearby and way excess unused wind… former Wyoming resident… enough wind, in fact to blow the whole thing clear to Nebraska if they don’t nail it down.

WUWT – ‘James Hansen, one of the world’s best-known global warming researchers and a recent vocal advocate of proposed coal plants’ i don’t think you meant advocate? typo?
REPLY: That’s from the article he advocates “clean coal” apparently….- A

The circular tiled building on the left looks a lot like CRU at UEA too!

Apart from the monster truck of course but that is offset by the Volvo and the (BMW) Mini in the car park.

Weren’t Democrats like Barrack Obama touting against clean-coal technology in their campaigns, whereas the Republicans were for it? I guess in the end, money talks. In exchange for building/powering a computing monstrosity to “show” that AGW is real, Wyoming and its coal businesses get a handout.
The leech called government grows ever larger.
This article is an excellent example of good journalism by the way.

42-next question?
“Hitchiker’s Guide” fan here.

Sweeeet:
“The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. When I testified against the proposed Kingsnorth power plant, I estimated that in its lifetime it would be responsible for the extermination of about 400 species – its proportionate contribution to the number that would be committed to extinction if carbon dioxide rose another 100 ppm.
”
Who said it?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal
Hansen! Yay!
REPLY: Thanks for the reminder! I’ve added WUWT’s previous coverage of this event to the article. – A

Since we’ve finally stumbled in to something I’m finally very familiar with…
This is about average to above average size for a single use data center. What’s not mentioned is in addition to the 8 MW incoming power from coal there will be at least 10 MW back up power from diesel generator – probably four 2.5 MW generators. These will run at least once a week unloaded and once a month fully loaded for about an hour. Fuel rate fully loaded for all four … 600 to 750 gallons per hour.
This is one reason why new data centers are located away from cities … too many emission restrictions. Even CDC in Atlanta has limits on testing their emergency power system.

Personally, I find the seaweed nailed to my fence to be more reliable than the Met Office’s mega-bloater. What’s more it’s carbon footprint is a big fat zero…

/snark on
What no windmills? No solar panels? No earthquake producing geothermal sites?How can this be? We were told that this was all ready to go and would produce all those “green” jobs. By not using “green” power sources and costing us all those new green jobs, NCAR must be un-American and they must be funded by the nasty Big Oil and Coal companies. Well we know what that means nothing they produce can be trusted since their Supercomputer benefits Big Coal.
/snarkoff

Its nice to see a contribution (even if it is only a tip) from Steve Goddard. I hope that previous history can be moved-on-from, and we can see more activity from Steve.

” Clawga (12:19:16) :”
I am also familiar with data centers and power consumption. “Back in the day”, bandwidth was the limiting factor to growth and your biggest financial constraint. These days bandwidth is cheap, it is power that is the constraint. A data center might have plenty of available floor space but it is “out of power”. This is why Google, for example, wants to become a power company. It has nothing to do with “green” this or that. It has to do with them buying power wholesale or being power operators themselves in order to get the power they need for their data centers.
Data center operators are deploying some interesting concepts to reduce power requirements. For every watt brought into that data center in electricity, a watt must be removed from the building in heat. Often, air handling capacity is the constraint on how much power you can bring in. If your climate control can only remove 10MW of heat, you are only going to bring in 10MW of power. So they are doing interesting things these days such as when the temperature outside is cooler than the desired data center temperature, you shut down your air handler and flood the data center with outside air.
Places like Wyoming have more days that are below the data center temperature than above. The average high temperature in Cheyenne is above optimum data center temperatures for only 3 months out of 12 and average nighttime lows are low enough year-round to use outside air. If the center is designed well, this can be leveraged to greatly reduce the amount of power overhead required to cool the data center.
Reference:
http://www.rssweather.com/climate/Wyoming/Cheyenne/

““deep black” that they use for climate simulation and short term forecasts.”
and they can’t get either one right
So what’s the point?

If I remember correctly , coal production in Wyoming has led to a major financial boom , and has brought jobs to the state which suffered an economic downturn after the expected oil shale boom went bust in the early eighties . No surprise to see that they rely on coal power .

This is so wrong on so many levels.
Being generous to NCAR — their super dooper computer will operate in the hundreds of teraFLOPS range, while the UK’s toy hopes to hit a more impressive target of a petaFLOPS. And NCAR’s unit will use four times the energy to operate (4-5 MW) than the UK’s more powerful unit (1.2 MW).
That’s a mighty impressive waste processing center NCAR’s aiming for in Wyoming.

Incidentally, love the ‘Death Train’ picture detail. Priceless.
Is that Jim in a cape?

greg2213 (12:21:40) :
Lets just put a small nuke plant by the technology park. It’ll answer all the green questions and power everything in the park.
Of course, that nuke will mean that everyone in the park will be glowing… 😉
But at least they will be glowing green.

AleaJactaEst (13:15:28)
The spin is losing kinetic energy – only a matter of time before the coin lands on heads.

Thanks for the link. I read the article and was astounded at absurdity of Professor Stephen Mobbs’ comments regarding the Met’s failed predictions:

“All models have biases and these are very small. It may be, as the Met Office suggests, that the observations are wrong, not the model.”

All that snow on the ground and biting cold weather is merely an observational error or perhaps mass hallucination? It is amazing to witness how these scientists have become so invested in their models that they are forced deny reality even when it bites them in the back side.

Costly energy makes jobs fly away to places with reasonably priced energy. QED.

“Why have they not yet found a way to reclaim the unwanted heat to generate electricity or heat greenhouses or something else productive?”
Have you ever spent a summer in Laurel, MD? There is plenty of heat available from other sources … day and night. I suppose there would be a possibility of using it for greenhouses but installations like that tend to be on a very secure compound. Who is going to work the greenhouses? This isn’t like a commercial building. This place will likely be in an area that regular people can’t just go in and out of.

what to makes of this piece, which the Times puts in their arts and entertainment section?
17 Jan: UK Times: Steven Swinford: BBC forecast for Met Office: changeable
BUFFETED by complaints about its inaccurate weather forecasts, the Met Office now faces being dumped by the BBC after almost 90 years.
The Met Office contract with the BBC expires in April and the broadcaster has begun talks with Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, as a possible alternative…
By contrast, many commercial rivals got their predictions for winter right. They benefit from weather forecasts produced by a panel of six different data providers, including the Met Office.
Despite criticism, staff at the Met Office are still in line to share a bonus pot of more than £1m. Seasonal forecasts, such as the one made in September, are not included in its performance targets…
Metra already produces graphics for the BBC, including its 3-D weather map which made some viewers feel sick.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6991064.ece

Could you calculate the number of coal cars per year it will take to run that supercomputer?

A crystal ball is much more energy efficient and just as reliable at forecasting the weather years in advance.

I was thinking the same thing, Nick:
“Costly energy makes jobs fly away to places with reasonably priced energy. QED.”
This story proves that even the government isn’t too dense to realize that energy costs make a huge difference in decisions like this. At least when their own budget is involved.
Yet, when President Obama blithely announces that he intends to make the cost of electricity skyrocket, he seems clueless about the same concept. Where does he think that industry, and their factories, and their JOBS, are going to go? To the state next door?
What if the state next door isn’t a state but another country, because all the states inside our borders have become prohibitively expensive? So the incentive to relocate to China will be made infinitely larger because they’re not so foolish. How is that going to help us or anyone in the world really? All it does is shift prosperity somewhere else while aiding the environment not a whit.

Anthony, you’ve got to cover this:
BBC to consider dropping the Met Office for weather forecasts. The funny thing is, the story is posted in the Entertainment section of The Times ;).
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had endless entertainment viewing the forecasts and predictions of the UK Met Office!

Is the BBC going to dump the Met Office and its supercomputer?
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6991064.ece

Dr. Hansen surely must be aware of the relationship between fossil fuels, CO2 and atmospheric temperature. If not, he should consider the following:
a) The atmosphere contains 750 Gt of carbon.
b) There are about 4,000 Gt of known fossil fuel reserves.
c) If every Gt of fossil fuel reserves were burned, atmospheric CO2 would increase from the present 390 to 2,470 ppm.
d) This would result in a logarithmic temperature increase of about 1.4C.
e) For the last 600 million years the temperature has varied from 12C to 22C
26% of the time at 22C and 6% of the time at 12C. We are presently at 14.5C.
(Scotese)
f) After burning all the fossil fuel, the temperature would increase to 15.9C, about 39% off the bottom of the historical range.
g) We are much closer to the “tipping point” of 90 ppm wherein photosynthesis would cease and turn the Earth into a plantless snowball.
h) 550 million years ago CO2 was 7,000 ppm, when there were no coal-fired power plants (Berner).

This article appeared in the Rockhampton (Queensland Australia) morning Bulletin on 22.12.09.
The Editor
The Morning Bulletin.
I have sat by for a number of years frustrated at the rubbish being put forth about carbon dioxide emissions, thermal coal fired power stations and renewable energy and the ridiculous Emissions Trading Scheme.
Frustration at the lies told (particularly during the election) about global pollution. Using Power Station cooling towers for an example. The condensation coming from those cooling towers is as pure as that that comes out of any kettle.
Frustration about the so called incorrectly named man made ‘carbon emissions’ which of course is Carbon Dioxide emissions and what it is supposedly doing to our planet.
Frustration about the lies told about renewable energy and the deliberate distortion of renewable energy and its ability to replace fossil fuel energy generation. And frustration at the ridiculous carbon credit programme which is beyond comprehension.
And further frustration at some members of the public who have not got a clue about thermal Power Stations or Renewable Energy. Quoting ridiculous figures about something they clearly have little or no knowledge of.
First coal fired power stations do NOT send 60 to 70% of the energy up the chimney. The boilers of modern power station are 96% efficient and the exhaust heat is captured by the economisers and reheaters and heat the air and water before entering the boilers.
The very slight amount exiting the stack is moist as in condensation and CO2. There is virtually no fly ash because this is removed by the precipitators or bagging plant that are 99.98% efficient. The 4% lost is heat through boiler wall convection.
Coal fired Power Stations are highly efficient with very little heat loss and can generate massive amount of energy for our needs. They can generate power at efficiency of less than 10,000 b.t.u. per kilowatt and cost wise that is very low.
The percentage cost of mining and freight is very low. The total cost of fuel is 8% of total generation cost and does NOT constitute a major production cost.
As for being laughed out of the country, China is building multitudes of coal fired power stations because they are the most efficient for bulk power generation.
We have, like, the USA, coal fired power stations because we HAVE the raw materials and are VERY fortunate to have them. Believe me no one is laughing at Australia – exactly the reverse, they are very envious of our raw materials and independence.
The major percentage of power in Europe and U.K. is nuclear because they don’t have the coal supply for the future.
Yes it would be very nice to have clean, quiet, cheap energy in bulk supply. Everyone agrees that it would be ideal. You don’t have to be a genius to work that out. But there is only one problem—It doesn’t exist.
Yes – there are wind and solar generators being built all over the world but they only add a small amount to the overall power demand.
The maximum size wind generator is 3 Megawatts, which can rarely be attained on a continuous basis because it requires substantial forces of wind. And for the same reason only generate when there is sufficient wind to drive them. This of course depends where they are located but usually they only run for 45% -65% of the time, mostly well below maximum capacity. They cannot be relied for a ‘base load’ because they are too variable. And they certainly could not be used for load control.
The peak load demand for electricity in Australia is approximately 50,000 Megawatts and only small part of this comes from the Snowy Hydro Electric System (The ultimate power Generation) because it is only available when water is there from snow melt or rain. And yes they can pump it back but it cost to do that. (Long Story).
Tasmania is very fortunate in that they have mostly hydro electric generation because of their high amounts of snow and rainfall. They also have wind generators (located in the roaring forties) but that is only a small amount of total power generated.
Based on a average generating output of 1.5 megawatts (of unreliable power) you would require over 33,300 wind generators.
As for solar power generation much research has been done over the decades and there are two types. Solar thermal generation and Solar Electric generation but in each case they cannot generate large amounts of electricity.
Any clean, cheap energy is obviously welcomed but they would NEVER have the capability of replacing Thermal power generation. So get your heads out of the clouds, do some basic mathematics and look at the facts not going off with the fairies (or some would say the extreme greenies.)
We are all greenies in one form or another and care very much about our planet. The difference is most of us are realistic. Not in some idyllic utopia where everything can be made perfect by standing around holding a banner and being a general pain in the backside.
Here are some facts that will show how ridiculous this financial madness the government is following. Do the simple maths and see for yourselves.
According to the ‘believers’ the CO2 in air has risen from .034% to .038% in air over the last 50 years.
To put the percentage of Carbon Dioxide in air in a clearer perspective;
If you had a room 12 ft x 12 ft x 7 ft or 3.7 mtrs x 3.7 mtrs x 2.1 mtrs, the area carbon dioxide would occupy in that room would be .25m x .25m x .17m or the size of a large packet of cereal.
Australia emits 1 percent of the world’s total carbon Dioxide and the government wants to reduce this by twenty percent or reduce emissions by .2 percent of the world’s total CO2 emissions.
What effect will this have on existing CO2 levels?
By their own figures they state the CO2 in air has risen from .034% to .038% in 50 years.
Assuming this is correct, the world CO2 has increased in 50 years by .004 percent.
Per year that is .004 divided by 50 = .00008 percent. (Getting confusing -but stay with me).
Of that because we only contribute 1% our emissions would cause CO2 to rise .00008 divided by 100 = .0000008 percent.
Of that 1%, we supposedly emit, the governments wants to reduce it by 20% which is 1/5th of .0000008 = .00000016 percent effect per year they would have on the world CO2 emissions based on their own figures.
That would equate to a area in the same room, as the size of a small pin.!!!
For that they have gone crazy with the ridiculous trading schemes, Solar and roofing installations, Clean coal technology. Renewable energy, etc, etc.
How ridiculous is that.
The cost to the general public and industry will be enormous. Cripple and even closing some smaller business.
T.L. Cardwell
To the Editor I thought I should clarify. I spent 25 years in the Electricity Commission of NSW working, commissioning and operating the various power units. My last was the 4 X 350 MW Munmorah Power Station near Newcastle. I would be pleased to supply you any information you may require.

AleaJactaEst (13:15:28) :
Piers Corbyn, the independent weather forecaster, predicted the winter cold many months ago, to the surprise of many meteorologists. He says the Met Office failed to warn of extreme events in their seasonal forecasts because they are employing a computer model based on the assumption of man-made climate change.

IMO this is the best part

What sort of weather/climate “rethink” by the UK Met Office might this turn out to be?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8462890.stm

Beyond cost, the Colorado front range is rapidly running out of electricity. Sebelius, when she was the Governor of Kansas, unconstitutionally tried to deep-six the expansion of the coal-fired Holcomb generating station in far western Kansas. Speculation was rife at the time it was to give her “bona fides” with the Obama camp as a real environmentalist. Maybe it worked too. Anyway – they utility people I know in Colorado are adamant – if they can’t find an additional two thousand megawatts there will be California style rolling blackouts this coming decade along the front range. It’s not merely cost – it is availability – they can’t add that type of load to the grid up at Boulder.

Speaking of coal, Terence Cardwell spent 25 years in the Electricity Commission of NSW (Australia) working, commissioning and operating the various power units, lastly at the 4 X 350 MW Munmorah Power Station near Newcastle. His letter appears in the Rockhampton Morning Bulletin where he lifts the lid on carbon dioxide emissions. http://thesixtyzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/cardwell-letter.pdf – More about Terry here: http://thesixtyzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/cardwell.pdf

Every where I go they tell me that the science is settled, the debate is over, etc. and it’s time for action, blah, blah, blah. If so, one would think think that jumbo mega-computers dedicated to “climate research” would not be needed, wouldn’t one?
Paul

Seriously, you want to have a look at this in the Timesonline. The cracks are appearing! http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2

Howard Mitchell (15:00:24) :
Xft x Xft x Xft = volume, not area

“Nigel S (11:49:16) :
Apart from the monster truck of course but that is offset by the Volvo and the (BMW) Mini in the car park.”
Monster truck? That looks like your typical Chevy Silverado 1/2-ton crew-cab pickup. Here in farm ‘n ranch country that’s almost a compact truck. Trucks like that fill probably one-third of your average parking lot. If they are going to build the facility in Cheyenne they had better plan for large parking spots. Unless only climate scientists work there…Prius’s don’t need large spaces.
I don’t live in Wyoming but it is one of my favorite states to visit. Wide open spaces and beautiful scenery. Even better, a Wyoming “liberal” would be considered a right-wing wacko on the east or west coast.

Many years ago….
Many years ago, Walter Orr Roberts gave me a tour of NCAR. I did not comprehend: the Crays.
I do not comprehend, today.
Roberts, who would be disgusted by what’s happening today, studied “greenhouse glasnost” in the 1980’s, a non-problem, he decided then.
This is not science.

Colorado pays a premium for electricity to get wind energy generated in Wyoming.
Meanwhile, Wyoming uses cheap, coal-fired power.

Coal+Power Plant+Supercomputer=Climate Model
Climate Model+Politician=no Coal-fired Power Plant
Attention Cheyenne Light Fuel and Power- these guys are not your friends.

Obviously, they should be required to power the super computer by windmills and without connection to the evil power grid. That way the computer center works which ever way the wind blows but not when the wind doesn’t blow.

PaulH (15:44:20) :
Every where I go they tell me that the science is settled, the debate is over, etc. and it’s time for action, blah, blah, blah. If so, one would think think that jumbo mega-computers dedicated to “climate research” would not be needed, wouldn’t one?
You need to supercompute the Global Warming causes next Ice Age scare, because the present scare is coming apart at the seams. They will go on a massive 20 year hunt to cherry pick the evidence to fit thier newest concoction. See, they were right in the first place. The oceans will now drop, stranding shipping everywhere. The glaciers will cut off water supplies. And it’s all due to C02.
Why do you think Gore bought shorline property?
Gravy Train.

I still don’t understand, why is all this money being spent on research and new supercomputers? Seems an awful lot of trouble and wasted resources to expend for an area of science which is “settled”. Since it’s all been worked out and there is no questioning AGW “science” the logical thing to do would be re-purpose all these research locations, computing power and scientists to other areas of research. The “science” is done and the remediation plan was put in place in Copenhagen it looks like this whole thing has been wrapped up and we needn’t expend anymore time and effort on it.

And when it is all done, a handful of people will be sitting around with their home pcs and have to re-examine all of the data and re-analyze the results.

Hypocrites!

Maybe the BBC wants to trade in the MET
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6991064.ece
Now how could we trade in NCAR and their 8 Mega watts for Piers Corbin and his brain.

JCAkin (17:18:06) :
You have a point.  We should all write our respective elected officials and demand that they stop funding research into settled areas.  🙂
Mike Ramsey

Crosspatch:
“Places like Wyoming have more days that are below the data center temperature than above. The average high temperature in Cheyenne is above optimum data center temperatures for only 3 months out of 12 and average nighttime lows are low enough year-round to use outside air. If the center is designed well, this can be leveraged to greatly reduce the amount of power overhead required to cool the data center.”
Let me guess, just beside the outside datacenter air outlet will be where they site the thermometer…

The word we are looking for I think is, Hypocrite… These mob are the epitome of Hypocrite.

rbateman (17:41:59) :
Ya gotta love this business plan: Keep dropping the stations and keep adding the Petaflops. Soon, they will be able to achieve division by zero.
—–
Reply: But sir, you don’t need petaflops to solve that equation, or fewer weather stations, either. Division by zero, just like their climate models, is indeterminate.

Somewhat O.T. but I do not know a better way of passing this on.
Following on from the extreme cold conditions in the northern hemisphere I found this comment regarding New Zealand interesting http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/stories/2010/01/17/1247ec574543 . Considering that N.Z. is in the middle of summer it should be warm, not up to 10C colder than normal, somewhat in line with N.H. temperatures. Global Warming, what global warming.
p.s. N.Z. time is currently 13 hours ahead of GMT.

Computer models are like surveys. You can design them to have any outcome that you want.

Galen Haugh (18:28:08) :
I was going to go for getting to zero by dividing by 2 starting with 1.
Or pose the question of how many Petaflops does it take to screw in a light bulb.

I need to say that again.
82 plus arces of solar panals….
the entire output of the largest state-of-the-art solar power station in the US… 8 megawatts…
to run a climate modeling program,
which any programmer knows is, Garbage in Garbage out…
to “prove” global warming.

The first easy thing to audit in climate models coming out of NCAR is if they factor in the heat island spot above their supercomputer and the facilities that burn the coal.

@John
“Myths about Coal up in Smoke”, by Terence Cardwell
http://thesixtyzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/cardwell-letter.pdf
Quote: “First, coal-fired power stations do NOT send 60 to 70% of the energy up the chimney. The boilers of modern power stations are 96% efficient and the exhaust heat is captured by the economisers and reheaters and heat the air and water before entering the boilers.”
[and]
“They can generate power at efficiency of less than 10000b.t.u. per kilowatt and cost-wise that is very low.”
I’m having difficulty reconciling these two apparently conflicting statements.
The second statement obviously contains an error in units since a btu cannot be converted to kilowatts. The correct units are:
1 btu/hr = 2.93297 EE-04 kW
or
1 btu = 2.93297 EE-04 kWH
At 100% efficiency, 10,000 btu converts to 2.93297 kWH.
The figure stated in the latter statement of the article calculates at [greater than] 34.1% efficiency, or a loss of [less than] 65.9%., a far cry from the 96% efficiency claimed in the former statement.
Where is the [less than] 1.93297 kWH per 10,000 btu going, if not up the chimney as heat? My guess is the printing of a typographical error in the 2nd statement, but due to my not being familiar with the design of these plants, am unsure of the correct explanation for the discrepancy.

More CO2 = tipping point = runaway temps.
So, next to this supradupra puter, they build a huge bio-dome, fill it up with water vapour, toss in some co2 and watch the temp go up. Use the rising temp to power generator. Cheap electricity.
They believe in tipping points, maybe they’ll believe the above.

Anyone compare the cost/flop of this center to that provided by Amazon?
My guess is that Amazon can do it for one-tenth the cost.
Just saying.

The Anthropogenicus Circus Warmicus will never end – as long as the Fed. Mints continue to be powered up.

I half wonder if this project will actually get built because it involves sweeteners in the form of state money and its beginning to look like circular financing. Anyway, if one is going to build this device, despite all indications that more computing power will not bring a jot of wisdom to one side of this debate, there are a couple of advantages to putting it in Cheyenne besides power rates, power reliability, and reasonable environmental temperatures.
First, there is already enough wind energy just on the outskirts of Cheyenne to run the darned thing, except when it is really cold, or in summer, when the wind hardly blows. We’d make as much as 250,000MW here by wind, precisely at the times when no one needs it, except there is no transmission capacity to handle what we have now–and the 100,000 windmills needed would convince the most sparkle-headed watermelon of the menace of sustainable energy. Second, 8MW is nothing as you all know. We have a 4500 MW plant west of here that burns coal, of course, and sends the power to the greenies in California. Third, there is all the communications bandwidth in the world running east-west and north-south through Cheyenne. If you surf the internet or watch TV its a sure bet the data passed through this town.
The best part of the project, if it ever comes to pass, is that the research staff will stay in Boulder.

Methow Ken (21:19:50) :
If the U.K. Met Office has ”deep black”, why then of course NCAR has to try and go one (or 2 or 3)
They can call it Deep InfraRed…

royfomr (18:12:57) :
To Boulder go,
where no Mann,
has gone before.

Groan!

Part of Wyoming’s offer to NCAR was that the site on which the supercomputer is to be built would have “guaranteed power transmission of 24 megawatts”. That suggests NCAR expects that it’s machine or its successor machines will draw considerably more juice that the 8 megawatts that are initially required.
To put the present and future power requirements in perspective, the total electric power draw for the entire City of Boulder currently comes to about 100 megawatts.
The probable reason why electric power is cheaper in Wyoming than Colorado is that Colorado utilities use a substantial amount of natural gas to generate electricity, whereas Wyoming utilities use almost none. According to figures from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, in 2007, Wyoming generated 43.1 million megawatt hours of electricity with coal and 594,000 megawatt hours with natural gas. Colorado generated 35.9 million megawatt hours with coal and 15 million megawatt hours with natural gas. Both states get small amounts of electricity from wind. In 2007, Colorado actually got more electricity from wind than Wyoming did (1.29 million megawatt hours for Colorado vs 754, 000 for Wyoming), but this may have changed by now.
Wyoming coal from the Powder River Basin costs $8.40 a ton, the cheapest in the US. No one else comes close. A ton of Powder River Basin coal contains about 17.6 million BTUs of energy. To get a similar amount of energy from natural gas, you would have to buy about 17,000 cubic feet of the stuff. The price of natural gas got down to $3 per 1,000 cubic feet earlier this year but it is currently around twice that. Either way, the difference in cost is pretty striking.
Personally, I don’t much care where NCAR chooses to locate its computing center, but I do think that its decision to power it with electricity from cheap Power River Basin coal makes a mockery of the public policy prescriptions its scientists have been making. If the folks warning of impending catastrophe aren’t prepared to change their life style to avert it, why should anyone take them seriously?

@ Michael (15:51:59) :
“All The Climategates Men”
yeah, from Warmer Brothers…

The IPCC may be Eating More Crow soon…
The Times, January 17, 2010
World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece
Jonathan Leake and Chris Hastings
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.
Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments.”
The IPCC’s reliance on Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine. Pearce said: “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis. Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers. not the whole massif.”
The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with the New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.
When finally published, the IPCC report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the likelihood of the glaciers melting was “very high”. The IPCC defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%. The report read: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”
However, glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are far lower.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 meters [394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred meters thick and tens of kilometers long. The average is 300 meters thick so to melt one even at 5 meters a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.”
Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about glaciers. “I am not an expert on glaciers.and I have not visited the region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to assume he knew what he was talking about,” he said.
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”. Last week the IPCC refused to comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public.
The lead role in that process was played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC’s finding. He traced the IPCC claim back to the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been “speculative”, and published the update in the New Scientist.
Cogley said: “The reality, that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report. The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”
Pearce said the IPCC’s reliance on the WWF was “immensely lazy” and the organisation need to explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source. Hasnain could not be reached for comment.
The revelation is the latest crack to appear in the scientific consensus over climate change. It follows the climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried to prevent other researchers from accessing key date. Last week another row broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely.
***************************************************************************
Climate change experts clash over sea-rise ‘apocalypse’
Critics say an influential prediction of a 6ft rise in sea levels is flawed
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6982299.ece
Jonathan Leake
Climate science faces a new controversy after the Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit which suggested that global warming could raise sea levels by 6ft by 2100.
The research, published by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, created headline news during the United Nations summit on climate change in Denmark last month. It predicted an apocalyptic century in which rising seas could threaten coastal communities from England to Bangladesh and was the latest in a series of studies from Potsdam that has gained wide acceptance among governments and environmental campaigners.
Besides underpinning the Copenhagen talks, the research is also likely to be included in the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This would elevate it to the level of global policy-making.
However, the studies, led by Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at Potsdam, have caused growing concern among other experts. They say his methods are flawed and that the real increase in sea levels by 2100 is likely to be far lower than he predicts.
Jason Lowe, a leading Met Office climate researcher, said: “These predictions of a rise in sea level potentially exceeding 6ft have got a huge amount of attention, but we think such a big rise by 2100 is actually incredibly unlikely. The mathematical approach used to calculate the rise is simplistic and unsatisfactory.”
The row comes just weeks after the so-called climategate affair when emails leaked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit revealed how scientists tried to withhold data from public scrutiny.
The new controversy, which has no connection with Climategate, dates back to January 2007, when Science magazine published a research paper by Rahmstorf linking the 7in rise in sea levels from 1881-2001 with a 0.7ºC rise in global temperature over the same period.
Most scientists accept those data and agree that sea levels will continue to rise. However, Rahmstorf then parted company from colleagues by extrapolating the findings to 2100 — when the world is projected to have warmed by up to 6.4ºC unless greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced. Based on the 7 inch increase in 1881-2001, Rahmstorf calculated that such a spike in temperature would raise sea levels by up to 74 inches — a jump that stunned other experts.
They say it is unsafe to use the relatively small increases in sea levels seen in the 19th and 20th centuries to predict such extreme changes in future. Another critic is Simon Holgate, a sea-level expert at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Merseyside. He has written to Science magazine, attacking Rahmstorf’s work as “simplistic”.
“Rahmstorf is very good at publishing extreme papers just before big conferences like Copenhagen when they are guaranteed attention,” said Holgate. “The problem is that his methods are biased to generate large numbers for sea-level rise which cannot be justified but which attract headlines.”
One key problem cited by Holgate is that much of the 1881-2001 sea-level rise came from small glaciers melting in regions such as the Alps and Himalayas. Such glaciers are, however, disappearing fast and will be largely gone by 2050. It means further rises in sea levels would have to come from increased melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.
These hold enough water to raise global sea levels by more than 200ft, but their recent contribution to sea-level rise has been negligible. Jonathan Gregory, a sea-level specialist at the Met Office, said: “We do not know enough about the physics of large ice sheets to predict how global temperature rise will affect them. My concern about these extreme predictions is that they could discredit the whole process because they are not backed up by solid science and that is vital in such a political area of research.”
Rahmstorf said he accepted the criticisms but his work was “the best system we have got”. He added: “I agree that there has been too little research into the behaviour of ice sheets but that is exactly why I did this research. It uses simple measurements of historic changes in the real world to show a direct relationship between temperature rise and sea level increase and it works stunningly well.”
Rahmstorf said the last decade had, however, seen preliminary evidence suggesting that the ice sheets of Greenland and West Antarctica were becoming unstable. He said: “In my heart I hope my critics are right because a rise of the kind my work predicts would be catastrophic,” he said. “But as a scientist I have to look at the evidence . . . my figures for sea-level rise are likely to be an underestimate of what the world will face by 2100.”

Nigel S (11:45:21) :
The circular tiled building on the left looks a lot like CRU at UEA too!
My eyes are bleary, and, at first, I read that as “the circular *file* building on the left looks a lot like CRU at UEA too!” — and I’m wondering how much data may actually be going into the circular file in both locations…

Dear MB,
NCAR’s supercomputer will be8 Megawatts:
“I‟m holding a Denver Post article that tells the story of an 8.2 MW solar-power plant built on 82 acres in Colorado. The Post proudly hails it “America‟s most productive utility-scale solar electricity plant”. But when you account for the fact that the sun doesn‟t always shine….”
From : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/14/now-thats-a-commencement-speech/
That’s 82+ acres of solar power to run this computer!!!!
That is the entire output of the largest state-of-the-art solar power station in the US… 8 megawatts…
to run a climate modeling program,
which any programmer knows is, Garbage in Garbage out…
to “prove” global warming.

Anthony, don’t have time to read the other comments this a.m. so I am certain that I am repeating ….. Excellent, excellent investigative reporting. Deserving of the Pulitzer. What our now corporate-owned-and-corrupted “mainstream media” used to do at least some of the time.
More subscriptions should be coming your way.

It’s a good thing this supercomputer was not built to run on nuclear power from the state (I believe it is Connecticut) as priced in this graph: 19 cents per kWh – data from 2007 and EIA. Operating costs would be almost 4 times greater had they done so.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_6aSqRkDo2y4/SgY6zX-z1lI/AAAAAAAAACE/ydphQb2R0w4/s1600-h/Image.JPG
This graph (generated by me) is included in my post on Nuclear Nuts – which was argued at some length on WUWT several months ago.
I find it fascinating that the new nuclear project that is closest to reality, in the USA, is South Texas Nuclear Project expansion; and the prospective project owners have filed lawsuits against each other. Not a happy camp, nor happy campers.
The need of society for electric power continues to increase, and that need will be met by natural gas. Natural gas power is cheap and clean, the plants are easy to permit and quick to construct with essentially zero delays and zero cost over-runs. And no toxic byproducts left behind.

Number one consideration for running large compute clusters is availability of power. The second consideration for running large compute clusters is availability of cooling, either air or water.
The other considerations like price of land and manpower are all secondary. These compute clusters are a huge deal for power companies because they put a huge load on the electrical grid and the power supply needs to be extremely reliable.
Any anomalous blip may cause huge problems across the compute systems and could result in losing upwards of weeks of work.

From Kate (05:48:06) :
[And what I think Kate is doing – thank you, Kate – is the same kind of thing Kate is showing other people doing, and is the same kind of thing Christina Hoff Sommers did in her book, “Who Stole Feminism”, where she chased down the, eventually absent, basis for various claims the “gender feminist”, Feminazis were making about “domestic violence” and the “Patriarchy”. It’s a common, purposeful “Progressive” propaganda m.o. to essentially just make things up and throw in some “references” which don’t support what is claimed.]
The problem is that nobody who studied this material [on Himalayan Glaciers] bothered chasing the trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.”
In practice, by now I simply dismiss everything the ipcc says as “fact” because they are not proceeding scientifically in the first place, and they did in fact ~”want this sort of thing to end up in an ipcc report”; and because it’s going to be much easier to just start over from “scratch” in analyzing the “climate”, as opposed to giving the ipcc any credit whatsoever in having contributed a net useful piece of work.
The ipcc didn’t intend to do real science to begin with, and they even admit it. Their idea was to disasterize what human activity could possibly do in respect of “harm”, totally unbalanced by any counter argument, science, or fact. That ain’t Science.
For the ipcc, the possible automatically becomes the actual, then automatically even an epidemic which we must do something really stupid about, or “we’re all gonna die”.
Whopeeee! So now we can save the World either by committing suicide or else by becoming slaves! The Islamofascists are actually on the leading edge of progress!

I am an engineer of the University of Wyoming. We love our coal. We burn coal to heat the campus at our central energy plant. You can’t beat coal. The NCAR facility deal was done during the last boom, when we could offer all kinds of sweetheart deals to NCAR that Boulder couldn’t match.

J.H. Models could perfectly run in an XT personal computer with 640K RAM running Basic, it´s just CO2 vs. temperature and a convenient adjustment, that´s all.

catmman (12:39:49) :
I Lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming for three years.
Why put a supercomputer in Wyoming?
Why indeed.
Kevin Kilty (21:31:53) :
(snip) Third, there is all the communications bandwidth in the world running east-west and north-south through Cheyenne. If you surf the internet or watch TV its a sure bet the data passed through this town.
The best part of the project, if it ever comes to pass, is that the research staff will stay in Boulder.
My reply;
Where else are they going to store the original RAW data, and process it with new programs that don’t have to rely on the crap found on line every where else?
Before you can control the spin, you have to know where the center really is, keeping it separate will help, keeping the “climate” researchers out, will allow them to forecast weather un encumbered.
With all of the internet infrastructure passing through town, any left over idle time can be used to keep up with all of the bloggers, and their subscribers.
Label it NOAA or anything else it is still Guberment computer time being used for whatever “they think” it needs to be used for.

In fairness, at least a significant percentage of the cores in the NCAR cluster are reputed to be either Opteron Istanbul CPUs or “Coolthreads” SPARC CPUs. Both are pretty good in the energy department. No link, this is “street knowledge.”