Newsbytes from Dr. Benny Peiser at the GWPF:
The British government faces a public backlash against its green energy agenda as consumers are unwilling to spend more on power and gas bills to pay for investment in low-carbon forms of energy, a parliamentary committee warned on Monday. An opinion poll published by utility Centrica last month showed only one quarter of respondents thought the government should stick to its plans for a greener economy if it means higher energy price. —Reuters, 25 July 2011
Industry faces energy price increases of up to 70 per cent as a result of new ‘green taxes’ imposed by the Government. Studies by the Energy Intensive Users Group, which represents industries such as chemicals and steel, show that the extra costs are so high that many companies may be tempted to move to countries that do not have such extreme environmental laws. —Tom McGhie, This is Money, 24 July 2011
There are some wholly implausible assumptions about the pass-through of carbon and renewable subsidy costs. Our suspicion is that DECC has massaged the figures to make the impacts look less severe. —Jeremy Nicholson, Bloomberg, 29 July 2011
If the Prime Minister wants to get involved in climate change policy he should focus on problems closer to home first. Just last week the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) published a report which estimated that prices would rise for large energy intensive users by up to 52 per cent by 2020, with a central estimate of a 31 per cent rise. Unfortunately, this may be about as reliable as their farcical estimates for domestic consumers. —Matthew Sinclair, Conservative Home, 1 August 2011
The UK government has welcomed new developments in “unconventional” gas resources. It is largely a let’s-wait-and-see response, which acknowledges the economic, environmental and security benefits of shale gas. Calls from environmentalist campaigners to freeze exploration in the UK have been given the bum’s rush. ––Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 26 July 2011
Climate change is far less serious than ‘alarmists’ predict, an eminent NASA scientist has said. Dr Roy Spencer, who works on the space agency’s temperature-monitoring satellites, claimed they showed ‘a huge discrepancy’ between the real levels of heating and forecasts by the United Nations and other groups. After looking at the levels of radiation in the atmosphere over the past ten years, he believes the Earth releases a lot more heat into space than previously thought. This means carbon dioxide emissions do not trap as much heat or force temperatures up as much as global warming bodies fear. —Tamara Cohen, Daily Mail, 30 July 2011
Questing Vole:
Strangely, no where in your essay, do you mention that we have emerged from a very cold period commonly referred to as the “little ice age” (LIA). So your alleged 1.3 degree (unit ??) warming is only global temperatures recovering from the LIA anomaly. When you walk out of a walk-in cooler, do you attribute the warming to CO2?
Most of the glacial ice that is melting, grew to its observed extent during the LIA period and is merely adjusting to the current milder temps.
No real student of climate would suggest this recovery is due to man (anthro) causes.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr5O1HsTVgA&w=640&h=390]
The above CBC video should give you pause, in your rush to certainty. Jumping to conclusions based on present day modeling and NOT empirical or observational evidence is a sure recipe for error and failure. Please pay particular attention to the wider geological time referenced graph. There is much empirical evidence that you are either unaware of or willfully ignoring. GK
Questing Vole,
Your post is well thought out, if rather wordy. It is interesting in that in encapsulates in one post the complete package of arguments used by the pro AGW. Without wanting to go through your entire post line by line, I would nonetheless like to make some comments.
Firstly, nobody denies (I hope) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increases would lead to rising temperatures. However, the question – which nobody has an answer to – is what is the actual climate sensitivity to a change in CO2 leves? Most scientists do agree though, that based on basic radiative physics, the effect of a doubling of CO2 levels would lead – all else being equal – to an increase in average global temperature of about 1.2C. This arises from the assumed radiative forcing to the doubling of 3.7 Watts per metre squared. The 1.2C increase is as a result of using the Stefan-Boltzman equation to solve for this increase in the radiation budget for black bodies. Where scientists are not agreed though, is the actual sensitivity to CO2 increases in the real world, the world governed by feedbacks of water vapour, cloud etc. The IPCC models all assume that a positive feedback results, which will leverage the effect of CO2. Other scientists such as Lindzen, Spencer, Christy etc, have cited evidence that feedback is net negative which would lead to a lower temperature increase than 1.2C.
Also, I should add, that your assertion that “none of the models can account for the current warming without CO2. None,” is a tautolgy. It shows either that they are correct, or that there are other forces at work which have not been taken into account.
There is also a large tranche in your post which amounts to appeals to authority. Of course, all the scientific bodies assert that CO2 increases will lead to dangerous warming, but as you will note, these statements are actually penned by a handfull of individuals – committee members – most of whom are not climate scientists. It is noteworthy that there has been some backlash from paid up members of those societies, such as the APS and Royal Society. The latter has now rewritten its previous alarmist statement.
Contrary to your believe, the recent speight of extreme weather is not unprecendented. There is evidence that the arctic ice was very low in the early twentieth century; extreme droughts occured in the American mid west in the 1930’s; NASA has acknowledged that there is no connection between last years Russian heat wave and climate change; accurate satellite monitoring of ice has only taken place since the 1970’s. Other citations in the IPCC report were also taken from grey literature. The assertion that the Amazon rainforest (which you mention) is very sensitive to drying out and dying was taken from a paper that actually looking at the effects of grazing, not climate change. A further paper has shown the rain forest to be extremely resilient in the face of a recent drought.
I hope that you will consider some of these points with an open mind, and take away the thought that the effect of CO2 is not as straightforward or as dire as the IPCC would like us to believe.
G. Karst;
Yes, the presumption that the late LIA is the “normal baseline” to which we should aspire to return is truly pernicious.
Thanks, but no thanks. A few degrees of global warming would be loverly. Too bad CO2 can’t do that, but at least it boosts ag production.
Friends:
I jump in to defend Questing Vole who (at August 2, 2011 at 3:46 am ) provides the text of – and a link to – a recent speech by the UK’s lunatic Secretary of State Chris Huhne. That speech sets out the ‘science’ behind the UK’s insane energy policy.
Several commentators seem to have assumed Questing Vole wrote to promote this madness, but I think he was reporting the political insanity which we in the UK are trying to cope against.
I suggest you read what Questing Vole reports because it could be an energy policy that is soon to come to a country near you.
Richard
Consumer resistance to high energy prices is certainly a step in the right direction but it is not enough. What has to happen is for opposition to green taxes to get organized and vote out the politicians who are responsible for this insanity. There is no anthropogenic global warming now. Any warming that does exist is due to natural causes.
I jump in to defend Questing Vole who (at August 2, 2011 at 3:46 am ) provides the text of – and a link to – a recent speech by the UK’s lunatic Secretary of State Chris Huhne. That speech sets out the ‘science’ behind the UK’s insane energy policy.
==============================
Doh!
The UK is also the country of the Stern Review. This stated in clear terms that global warming could be contained at a tiny fraction (1/5 to 1/20) of letting the catastrophe happen. Even if the catastrophe not a tad overstated, the mitigation costs certainly massively understated in theory – and with no one to manage those costs they just escalate, with zero results. In practice, the British Government has ignored the costs, so my family, like 25 million other households see fuel bills going up by double digit % per year, and we are paying over US$2 per litre ($8.75 per US gallon) for our gasoline. We have a concept of fuel poverty – anyone who is paying over 20% of net income on household fuel – which is over 25% of the population in Wales.
I analyse why the mitigation costs will be far greater than Stern (or the IPCC claim) and less effective at reducing CO2 at
http://manicbeancounter.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/climate-change-in-perspective-%E2%80%93-part-2-of-4-the-mitigation-curve/
Did I misconstrue your comment? If so… sorry! Nothing wasted as the comment and video may help others in doubt. GK
Brian H,
Nice one about the “Gallumphing Dromedary” considering that the “gallopingcamel” moniker relates to my ungainly running style (wing three-quarter).
Please pardon me for being such an optimist but you folks did elect Boris Johnson (the “Thinking Man’s Idiot”) as the Lord Mayor of London in place of the awful Red Ken Livingstone.
Assuming that another political miracle takes place to sweep away Huhne and his windmills it will also be necessary to retire the greybeards on the NLL:
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/07/07/thorium-lords/comment-page-1/#comment-1763
That baroness Angela Smith of Basildon is a breath of fresh air.
manicbeancounter,
Just for a moment suppose that the idea that the sun and cosmic rays have a greater influence on global climate than CO2 does. Wouldn’t that make all this CO2 mitigation look pretty foolish?
I think that Questing Vole is being a little disingenuous when it says the relevent extract is the science. The science is the typical junk spouted by politicians. i.e. Lets forget about emerging from the lowest planetary temperatures for 10,000 years and blame 3/4 of a degree rise in 100 years on a trace gas. Could easily have been written by Gore. The really relevent stuff is the section entitled “Ambition” and particularly the statement,
“It would mean ripping up that chapter of the social contract which holds that government should exist to protect the people.”
I cannot believe that any non communist politician since Karl Marx would dare even say such a thing, and then he tops it all off with the following:
“From today, we commit to work not to the prejudices of the past, but in service of a greater and more lasting good. The planet earth, and the life it sustains.”
The “Greater Good”…i.e. the justification for every atrocity committed in the 20th century. This man is a dangerous fanatic who would never even have tasted power were it not for the failings of the UK democratic system. I am amazed that no one in opposition, or even his own party can wake up and smell the putrication emanating from this mans brain. Please read this section of his speech (link thoughtfully provided by QuestingVole: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/chsp_artsci_cc/chsp_cc.aspx)
Mr Huhne may believe in God. The problem is that he thinks he is God himself.
Disko Troop,
Thanks for that link to Huhne’s speech on climate change driven by CO2. As you say, he may be using the same script writer as Al Gore. Given that this is transparent nonsense, there have to be politicians pointing out more plausible alternatives. Here in the USA, James Inhofe took on the Al Gore carbon offset scam and won without breaking a sweat.
Same problem here in Ireland, and in one of the worst recessions ever, they decide to introduce a C02 tax on fuel at a point when oil prices were low I think 2008? typical sneaky bast***s, anyway it’s just an excuse for revenue, if not C02 it will be something else and it’s going to get a lot worse in order to pay for the huge debt raked up by the banks that the tax payer has to pay!
2 of the coldest winters on record and people can’t afford to heat their homes and then the fuel to drive to work has 60-70% tax on it!
Madness, I say L.F.T.R (Thorium) power is the answer for the U.K and Ireland. Norway has thousands of years supply, if only governments spent on research for that instead of pumping billions into wind farms with the least wind this Island has seen in the last 2 years on record!
Energy independence , well almost, abundant, cheap, safe in L.F.T.R, we could make hydrogen or electricity for E.V’s, I mean this technology has so many benefits I just can’t understand why no one is actually building them??? Am I missing something about L.F.T.R ?
The Brits are their own worst enemies, and there’s precious little that we in the sane countries can do about it. Nevertheless the UK–and to a lesser extent Australia–have important international roles to play over the next several years. Their raison d’être will be to serve as a cautionary tales for the rest of the developed world. Soon everyone will learn that the unbridled, ill-informed Green agenda is economic suicide, and that reckless environmental policies actually kill people.
Yes, there are legitimate environmental issues out there, like overfishing in most of the world’s oceans, and the unsustainable mining of aquifers in the U.S. However the real environmental issues are all eclipsed by the mythology of the Flying CO2 Monster. The high priests of this secular religion currently have a stranglehold on the British government.
There’s some kind of computer glitch here. On this board, I feel comfortable using my real name, Larry Fields. However I’m getting posted as jabali316, a handle that I’ve used elsewhere, but not here. Moderators, what should I do about it?
[Reply] Have a look at the bottom of the comment editing box and see which service you are logged in via. You may need to log out, reboot, dance round the computer three times singing the Star Spangled Banner and sacrifice a chicken at midnight as well. Just to be sure. HTH TB-mod
gallopingcamel:
At August 3, 2011 at 8:51 pm you say of Huhne’s speech:
“he may be using the same script writer as Al Gore. Given that this is transparent nonsense, there have to be politicians pointing out more plausible alternatives.”
The problem for us in the UK is that all the major UK political parties support this nonsense: only one MP voted against the insane UK climate and energy Bill. The fringe UKIP party opposes it but the rest of the political spectrum does not. And the media – especially the BBC – continuously pumps out the nonsense of Huhne’s speech as being undoubted fact.
We need a champion of the calibre of Inhofe. Do you have any suggestions?
Richard
I regret to say you will probably have to do what I did. Move to France. 82% of our electricity is nuclear, 9% hydro, and the rest is mostly gas. Whilst the French pay lip service to the eco frenzy they mostly think of it as an opportunity to sell more electricity to the Huhnatic fringe, Italy,Spain and Germany. The Germans are clever, they have sneaked a few new coal stations in to “tide them over” as they are next to Poland which produces cheap coal. The French are building new generation nuclear plants, expensive now, but they may run for 80 years whilst the British tilt at windmills. T’was ever thus!
Jo Nova has featured a study saying that upgrading the coal plants to more efficient burn cycles would save 30% of their emissions, or 13% of the country’s total. Far in excess of the most optimistic outcome from throwing many times the expenditure into greenscams. The older the plant, the better the payoff from updating or replacing it.
Heh.
Brian H:
I write to provide some information to support th point you make at August 4, 2011 at 9:23 pm.
Germany has already decided to adopt the use of advanced coal-fired power stations following a decision to close its nuclear power plants. The lowest CO2-emitting option for the transition from nuclear is advanced coal-fired power, so Germany is funding the change to coal from a fund for promoting “clean energy” and for “combating climate change”: this has been reported on WUWT, see
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20110713-36277.html
Developments of conventional Pulverised Fuel (PF) technology will dominate coal-fired power station technology for decades to come because of investment risk from novelty. The only way this could be overcome is if a government undertook the risk from novelty. The next paragraph explains this.
Power stations operate for 30 years or more. A power station makes little profit in the first half of its life because it is then paying off the debt incurred to build it. But it makes large profit over the latter half of its life which is after the debt has been paid. PF has existed in various stages of development for more than a century and hundreds of PF power stations have operated for more than 30 years each. So, PF technology is proved and an investor (e.g. a bank) trusts that a new PF plant will operate for more than ~15 years and, therefore, he will make a profit. But a novel technology for coal-fired electricity generation (such as PFBC or ABGC: see below) is not proved by hundreds of examples each operating for decades under commercial conditions. Hence, the investor perceives he has high risk that he could fail to recover his investment or make a profit: the novel technology could fail to survive long enough for that. So, an investor in a power station using a novel technology puts a premium on the interest he demands for his loan, such that the risk is shared with the operator of the novel technology. This additional cost prevents power companies from adopting alternative technologies to developments of PF: a development of PF could be retrofitted as ‘conventional’ PF if it failed.
The aim of any power generation technology is to maximise efficiency of the generation. Efficiency is the proportion of available energy from a fuel that is converted into useable form (e.g. electricity). About half the energy from a fuel is ‘lost’ by a power generation system. Improved efficiency means more electricity for the same amount of fuel because more of the energy is converted to electricity and is not ‘lost’.
Combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) units using natural gas are the most efficient power stations at present. But coal-fired generators could be more efficient. Typically, a CCGT power station burning natural gas as a fuel is ~52% efficient.
Efficiency is not the only advantage of CCGT burning natural gas at present. A PF coal-fired power station gains efficiency but loses reliability from increased size. Hence, the optimum size for a coal-fired PF plant is ~2 GW. This adds to the demand for CCGT where natural gas is available because CCGT power stations burning natural gas can be small (e.g. 300 MW) at similar efficiency to a 2 GW PF plant burning coal. This small power station size has benefits to the power producer and the grid operator: a power company can obtain small increments of power provision by building CCGT thus spreading capital investment over time, and the grid operator benefits from many small but geographically wide-spread generation sets that can each be controlled.
One of the advantages of the novel technologies for coal-fired power generation is that several of them (e.g. AFBC, CFBC, PFBC and ABGC but not IGCC) can also be built as 300 MW units or larger with no loss of efficiency.
I was the Senior Materials Scientists at the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) and I worked on developing both pressurised fluidised bed combustion (PFBC) and the British Coal Air Blown Gasification Combined Cycle’ (ABGC) systems.
At Cottbus, Germany, a commercial coal-fired PFBC power station has been operating for over 20 years and at similar efficiency to CCGT using natural gas.
We developed ABGC to the stage where each component of a plant was tested at full scale then produced a computer model of the system that indicates a coal-fired ABGC plant would provide ~20% improvement in efficiency over CCGT using natural gas (n.b. this is ~20% improvement in output – so ~20% less fuel for the same output – and not ~20% improvement to total efficiency). At that point, in 1995, UK the government closed CRE as part of its closure of the UK coal industry so construction of a demonstration plant for ABGC did not occur.
The efficiency issues of combined cycles are simply explained as follows.
A turbine extracts heat energy from its working fluid (i.e. superheated steam or gas) which lowers the temperature of the fluid and uses the extracted energy to provide power (usually in the form of electricity).
The temperature drop of the fluid increases as more energy is extracted from it by the turbine. So, if the input temperature of the fluid is increased then more energy is potentially available from the turbine. And materials constraints prevent steam turbines having as high an input temperature of steam as the highest input temperatures of gas that can be tolerated by gas turbines.
But the gas coming out of a gas turbine is still sufficiently hot for it to superheat steam that can be fed to a steam turbine. So, a combined cycle uses both a gas turbine and steam turbine to utilise maximum energy from the fuel. Thus, a combined cycle is more efficient than either a gas turbine or a steam turbine alone.
However, when used on its own a gas turbine or a steam turbine operates at its maximum efficiency. Each of them obtains the maximum drop in temperature of its working fluid. This is not possible for a combined cycle because the lowest obtainable output temperature of a gas turbine is lower than the highest possible input temperature of a steam turbine. Therefore, in a combined cycle both the gas turbine and the steam turbine are operated at less than their optimum efficiencies but such that their combination has its maximum efficiency (and this maximum efficiency is higher than can be obtained from a steam turbine or a gas turbine alone).
The efficiency of a combined cycle can be improved by ‘topping’ the steam. Simply, the gas turbine is operated at its maximum efficiency and the temperature of the resulting ‘cool’ output gas is ‘topped’ by heating it to raise its temperature prior to its use to heat the steam for supply to the steam turbine. Thus, both turbines are operated at their maximum efficiency. The ‘topping’ can be achieved by diverting some of the gas from the supply to the gas turbine and burning it as a fuel to superheat the steam.
The benefit of operating both turbines at maximum efficiency is greater than could be thought because steam turbines are inherently more efficient than gas turbines. This is basically because superheated steam has a higher thermal capacity and is denser than the gas used in gas turbines. And it is why most activity to improve coal-fired power station efficiency concentrates on raising the steam temperature and pressure useable in a conventional Pulverised Fuel (PF) power station. Steam turbines are more efficient than gas turbines.
In the distant future it may be possible to operate steam turbines at the high temperatures now only possible for gas turbines: thus, efficiency could be greater than achievable using combined cycles. But this is not possible at present basically because superheated steam is very corrosive. Super alloys are being developed (although they tend to be expensive and nearly impossible to weld and machine) but – in my opinion – the best hope is ceramics. But those are issues for the future and here I am talking about the present.
CCGT power stations burning natural gas operate using the principles outlined above.
A PFBC is really a giant jet engine with the combustion chamber being the fluidised bed of coal ash burning coal as a fuel (anything that burns could be used as a fuel: we demonstrated operation of a PFBC bed using wet sewage as fuel). The pressurised hot gas (typically ~980 deg. C) from the fluidised bed is fed to a gas turbine to produce electricity. The temperature in the bed is controlled by water and steam pipes (that have very high thermal conduction efficiency because they contact the hot solids in the bed). The resulting steam is then superheated by the output of the gas turbine prior to its being fed to a steam turbine. Thus, PFBC obtains the efficiency advantage of using a combined cycle.
The ABGC system is a special form of ‘topping cycle’. Coal is converted to combustible gas in a coal gasifier and the gas is burned in a gas turbine to generate electricity. And coal is supplied to a PFBC. This provides two streams of hot gas (i.e. from the gas turbine output and from the PFBC combustor) and a steam supply. The output of the gas turbine is added to the pressurised gas from the PFBC combustor. Some of this gas goes to a gas turbine and some is used to ‘top’ the steam temperature. Thus, all the turbines operate at their individual maximum efficiencies.
It should be noted that the exhaust gases from PFBC and ABGC are extremely clean. Indeed, they have to be cleaned to be cleaner than the air in a typical office because otherwise they would damage the blades of the gas turbines.
I hope this is of some interest to you.
Richard
Richard;
Yes, very interesting — if somewhat excessively detailed!! 😉
As an alternative to ceramics, this would be an interesting possibility:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5158972/Starlite-the-nuclear-blast-defying-plastic-that-could-change-the-world.html
Brian H,
Fascinating link, thanx for posting.