This guest post is well worth a read – Anthony
Guest post by Harold Ambler
What follows is an excerpt from my new book Don’t Sell Your Coat, available here:
I want to examine the moral component of meteorological journalism. As I mentioned near the beginning of this book, I used to be an avid watcher of The Weather Channel. For a good couple of decades, the network was not only an important component for the fledgling cable industry, but an excellent source of information about current weather and climate, as well about atmospheric science itself. An interesting thing took place during the 1990s, though. Weather Channel viewership was found to spike during hurricanes, and not merely among viewers in areas that could be affected by the individual storm being discussed. A lot of folks evidently loved watching the progress of tropical storms, the stronger the better. Hurricanes became, over time, a revenue producer for the network. Experts were hired and given regular on-air time, and hurricane segments were given their own titles, their own graphics, and their own music.
People loved it. Much of this was quite innocuous, and arguably inevitable. Hurricanes are indeed interesting, and for a period of about 15 years it was widely believed, even by many scientists, that manmade global warming was ramping up the number, intensity, and duration of storms. In the last few years, however, links between recent atmospheric warming and hurricane activity, as we have seen, have been reconsidered.
In the meantime, though, the false link had lodged in the popular imagination, and The Weather Channel was more or less avidly exploiting it. The network’s presenters didn’t overtly come out and say that individual storms were generated by tailpipe and smokestack emissions, but they didn’t really have to at this point. The misconception was so pervasive and so widespread that merely trumpeting the “unusual” power of the storms themselves sufficed. In the meantime, the network slowly upped its on-air mentions of the phenomenon of global warming during the daily program cycle and eventually devoted a new segment to the phenomenon known as “Forecast Earth.”
Video alarmism regarding atmospheric phenomena is, perhaps, to be expected by a network like The Weather Channel. After all, it is hardly alone. The major cable news networks routinely send meteorologists and other reporters into the path of hurricanes, so that they can be seen amid the rising waters, gusting winds, and torrential rains.
Get it out of your head: weather didn’t used to be friendly. It didn’t used to rain just enough, snow just enough, with the wind blowing just enough, and the Sun shining just enough. Things didn’t recently go to Hell in a hand basket. That is just a story. And it’s not
a particularly hard story to prove false.
On the other hand, the tranquil weather being experienced by most people around the globe at any given time goes ignored and unvideotaped. Again, one can understand why this would be so. In the newspaper business, and other journalistic domains as well, fires are of note. Non-fires aren’t. Fair enough. But something very insidious has taken place. The selling of weather disasters as entertainment has led to a state in which big business stands to gain handsomely from the perception that the planet has gone meteorologically mad. Specifically, General Electric stands to profit. When in 2008 NBC (owned by General Electric) purchased The Weather Channel, an interesting thing took place: the largest domestic producer of wind turbines became the owner of the best-positioned purveyor of images of destructive weather. The same year, NBC’s Today Show continued its longstanding practice of “showing” the great destruction to the ocean-atmosphere system caused by manmade global warming, with story after story: fires, floods, melting Kilimanjaro, you name it. The rest of NBC News, and the Weather Channel, meanwhile, keep the same pieces of videotape on nearly infinite repeat.
Summing up: Wind turbines do not deliver reliable electric power; the ocean-atmosphere system is not broken; scaring people needlessly isn’t nice – and it distracts them from the actual environmental problems surrounding them.
About Harold Ambler
I was obsessed with weather and climate as a young boy and have studied both ever since. I have English degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia and started my career in journalism at The New Yorker magazine, where I worked from 1993 to 1999. My work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, The AtlanticWire (the Atlantic Monthly’s online presence), Watts Up With That?, The Providence Journal, Rhode Island Monthly, Brown Alumni Monthly, and other publications. I co-wrote and edited a 600-page history of rowing for Brown University, published in March 2009. I am grateful for donations to my research through PayPal on this site’s front page. I am married to the painter and illustrator Kim Edge. We have two daughters, one dog, and a cat.
=============================================================
Some reviews:
“ Harold Ambler has assembled an easy-to-follow, systematic, common-sense treatment of the manmade global warming agenda that demands the attention of any person of good
will in this debate.” – Joe Bastardi, chief forecaster, WeatherBELL Analytics
“ How did the good politics of social justice become chained to the bad science of global warming? Read Don’t Sell Your Coat to find out how it happened.” – Freeman Dyson, world-renowned physicist, professor emeritus at Princeton
“ You don’t need to be a right-wing SOB to think that ‘Man Made Global Warming’ is an Enron-style scam. Harold Ambler is a card-carrying liberal and he thinks so, too.
He’s also very funny. Buy this book!” – James Delingpole, author of Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors
==============================================================
I helped Harold gather some information for this book, and have read portions of this final book, and I recommend it as well. It is an easy to read narrative. It may surprise some people to learn that Harold Ambler is not your typical skeptic. I can collaborate what Delingpole says, that Ambler’s political leanings are very much liberal. He simply doesn’t buy into the global warming issue anymore as many of us used to, including me. – Anthony
Buy the book here:
LazyTeenager;
Nope. I don’t recall any of the promoters of cars telling me they are economical to do things they are not economical for, nor do I recall promoters of cars insisting that the road kill has nothing to do with the cars.
————–
That’s odd, maybe you look at different car advertising than I look at. In my world car promoters of cars tell me that cars are fun and inflate my social status. >>>
You’ve clearly never driven into a high school parking lot in a Ferrari.
LazyTeenager;
But hold on, you are executing the good old “move the goal posts tactic” tsk tsk! You seem to be trying to move from – wind mills are bad since they kill birds – to – wind mills are bad because the wind mill company lied to me – . Does this mean you are conceding my point that as far as bird kill and animal kill rates are concerned cars may very well be much worse?>>>
That wasn’t the issue. The car companies didn’t try to sell me 500 cars to move 500 bails of hay on the premise that it is more economical that way than to buy one large truck. The car companies don’t take my tax money to subsidize the cost of cars so that 500 cars at retail pricing actually cost less than one truck. The car companies didn’t try and tell me that running 500 cars down the highway is less wear and tear on the highway than one large truck.
If you weren’t so lazy, you would think these things through before coming up with a retort that has nothing to do with the main issue.
DocWat says:
December 16, 2011 at 7:06 pm
I have a peculiar view of the economics of the wind generator argument. I can see wind generators from my town. That means money is flowing into the county coffers, that does not come out of my pocket. Money is given to my customers, that replaces some of the taxes they pay, and when they do business with me, it trickles into my pocket.
———————————————————————
This is a common fallacy – thinking that local subsidies benefit you because they bring money into your community. The reality is there is a net outflow (a negative trickle) from your pocket, through the government and into the hands of “entrepreneurs” who oddly weren’t around trying to build businesses in your community prior to the government money becoming available to them.
In Toronto I watched a couple of young British “entrepreneurs” talking sweetly about how progressive our Provincial government was in taking “bold” steps toward a greener future (lots of wind turbines) and how happy they were to be a part of it. Why did these guys come all the way from the UK to help Canada spend its government subsidies? If you don’t know the answer, I would like to start a business with you. You invest the money and I will supply the entrepreneurial sweetness.
If you like mathematical examples:
Start with $700 million.
Subtract 15% which is eaten by the government as a handling fee.
Subtract 10% to the entrepreneurs.
Buy some wind turbines from Germany or solar panels from China.
Install them.
Run them at a cost which is 2-3 times your revenue.
————————————–
Calculate what the return was on the $700 million.
Now ask yourself how much of the $700 million you would be willing to put up if you were asked.
@ur momisugly Doc Wat who said “If I may buck the current… Here in Kansas, Wyoming, and other places, Wind generators make economic sense. ”
Speaking as a guy who makes his living designing mechanical systems one of the biggest and often most overlooked flaws in wind power is the decentralization of maintenance associated with large scale wind turbine power generation. In a traditional power generation plant you have a small number of very efficient large turbine and generator sets (anywhere from 2-20) that are centrally located and relatively easy to maintain in a efficient systematic way. In a wind farm however you have hundreds if not thousands of gen-sets spread over many square miles on top of tall poles. This not only makes the collection of power for transmition less efficient but both increases the amount of maintenance that must be performed and complicates the maintnenance procedures by an order of magnitude. These are major contributing factors to the high cost of wind power that can never be mitigated by economies of scale. Actually as this infrastructure ages and requires a higher frequency of maintenance the problem gets worse not better. It gets much worse with the off-shore wind farms being championed by big green. Finally due to the inherient inefficiency of collecting the power from a distributed generation grid each turbine must be as efficient as possible to minimize the effect of power loss during collection. This has led to a real environmental disaster due to the use of neodymium (rare earth) magnets in wind turbine gen-sets as can be seen here. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
Steve from Rockwood, Damage6,
You boys are chasing the wrong rabbit. Just because this concept is not properly managed (we agree on that) does not mean it cannot be properly managed.
In all my years on this earth, I have never seen “the government” fix anything. If it is a mess, the government makes it worse. If it is not a mess, the government turns it into one.
Feel free to point out any instances I may have incorrectly assessed.
Too many fingers in the pie.
A case: AGW
Not a problem until the government got involved. Now it is a huge, expensive mess.
Mr. Ambler has my vote: Don’t sell your coat!
LazyTeenager;
Before you respond to me, please read what Damage6 wrote above.
Then add to that the extra capacity that must be built into other energy sources to pick up the load when the wind don’t blow, and the reduced efficiency of other energy sources because they are most efficient when run “steady state” and are least efficient when fluctuating up and down to accomodate the vagaries of the wind, and then add to that the increased capital costs you will have to bear because the lifetime of conventional power plants will be dramatically shortened due to accomodating highly fluctuating loads.
NOW let’s go back you your car analogy. Find me a lie from the car industry as ridiculous as the notion that wind power makes any sense at all. Keep in mind BTW, that money = energy. All that money that must be spent to run wind mills, comes from other sources which by definition are not “green”. So not only is wind uneconomical, it more than likely has a net positive increase in CO2 associated with it. (backfilling with hydro generation may be the only exception that comes to mind, and why would one backfill with hydro if it was available since it is low carbon and cheaper than wind in the first place, so just use it instead of building wind mills!)
Harold, At last 🙂
Good luck with the book
Tonyb
LazyTeenager,
Because A causes misery and it’s tolerated, B, which also causes misery must be tolerated too according to your logic.
Sounds to me like you need to get clued up and study a bit here: http://summalogica.com/logic101/
Life is better if you don’t end up fooling yourself with fallacies…
8():
Harold
Have been to Amazon. I couldn’t see any full page description of what the book is about nor if it is available in Kindle format.
Tonyb
@LazyTeenager.
Your argument seems to be that if I loathe something that causes harm I should loathe all things that cause harm. But the harm that something causes should be weighed against its benefits.
If you’ve been reading WUWT you’ll know the answer and perhaps if you think about it for a while you’ll understand that in the context of cars and wind turbines the charge of hypocrisy is an oversimplified, ad hominem irrelevance.
By the way loath is an adjective meaning unwilling. You shouldn’t blindly follow my spelling just as you shouldn’t blindly follow AGW.
@LazyTeenager
If you look at the figures for roadkill and turbinekill each turbine has an annual kill rate of tens kilometres of main roads (apologies, I do not have the precise figures to hand of the analysis).. The cost benefit analysis of roads to human activity (utility, economy and happiness) also outweighs that of turbines even though the accident rate is significantly higher for cars. No contempt, just analysis of the available facts.
“How did the good politics of social justice become chained to the bad science of global warming?” – Freeman Dyson
Liberals have been latching on to all sorts of sorry issues over these last decades. A bit depressing as there are many good causes which will be discredited as a group when now, yet another liberal cause, AGW, becomes publicly known as a major fail.
And how did Conservatives become associated with God, guns, anti-science etc? Can’t one be a social liberal, fiscal conservative, atheist, science geek all at the same time without the MSM stereotyping us? Sigh.
Thanks to Anthony, first of all.
I will update the book yearly, at least, and am always grateful for information and corrections. I will, for instance, have to deal with the Comcast deal, which I knew of but wanted to let the dust settle more first.
@TonyB, the Amazon functionality will improve in the next several days. Thanks for your help throughout my process.
In terms of my politics, I can agree that I have been a liberal for much of my life. In truth, however, as I tried without much success to communicate to James D., my change of heart regarding AGW has left feeling like a man without a country in the political sphere. I must admit that I was not very charmed by the treatment that I received from the left when my HuffPo piece came out in early 2009. Probably more important, though, I am left speechless by the supposed eco-warriors actions regarding carbon dioxide, and the effect this has on otherwise intelligent friends of mine, and on human civilization itself.
Harold, modern liberalism has become fertile ground for totalitarian tendencies. Return to the classical liberalism of personal freedom, property rights, and true respect for the rights of others (rather than the psuedo-tolerance being promoted). You’ll be much happier. Still hated by those in your former country, but much happier because it’s the right place to be.
DocWat says:
December 16, 2011 at 9:23 pm
Steve from Rockwood, Damage6,
You boys are chasing the wrong rabbit. Just because this concept is not properly managed (we agree on that) does not mean it cannot be properly managed.
——————————————————————————–
Just for the record DocWat, I am not against wind power. I am against government subsidies. If someone wants to establish a wind farm and sell the power to the public utilities at normal rates, I’m all for it. But what we have is the government giving people tax payer money to set up the farms and then the government paying 2-3 times as much as traditional energy suppliers earn to keep these people in business. This is not green energy.
I can relate to the Weather Channel references. Ironically it played a big part in my becoming aware of the CAGW mass psychosis. During the 2000’s I had been encountering more and more global warming-as-fact mentions in various media and it was probably Heidi Cullen’s spots that finally nudged me to look further into it. Even before getting to the science, the “debate is over”-“science is settled” -“we’ve got to act now” remarks I read smelled fishy. And then that’s when I came across an account of Ms. Cullen’s diatribe calling for decertifying AMS meteorologists who dared to not accept the dogma that had been built up around the new religion. Thanks to Icecap, WUWT, Climate Audit, and many other fine bloggers I found plenty more to raise my ire at this travesty of politicized science. (I even wrote & recorded a song called “Political Science Fiction” I was so disgusted). The intrigue that has unfolded the last few years has been stunning and now it seems that the powers-that-be may be getting twitchy to play their hand. Keep your head down FOIA, whomever you are, and thanks for trying to keep the conversation open.
DocWat says:
December 16, 2011 at 6:54 pm
I presume you do not live near Wyoming or Kansas. I got my numbers from the vice-president of an electric power generating company. He was quoting his own company studies (43% actually) and like you
The air is considerably thinner in Wyoming due to elevation. Yes, there is some exceptional wind but it doesn’t have the same force as wind going the same speed at sea level. But for the residents of Wyoming, for every 9 cents/Kwh of wind they buy they can displace about 1 cent of coal.
“He simply doesn’t buy into the global warming issue anymore as many of us used to, including me. – Anthony”
I used to be a rabid warmist. But for me, and I expect many warmists who have moved to the skeptic side, truth is more important than ideology. I’ve often wondered what percentage of skeptics were at one time alarmists.
LazyTeenager says: December 16, 2011 at 3:48 pm
And what would you think if they gave you a copy of Inconevient Truth for Christmas? Maybe you need to rethink this, particularly the contempt you feel for others and your imagined superiority, especially around Christmas time.
*************
Hey, persons, I have finally “arrived” at WUWT! I been dissed by the Lazy Teenager!
Cool! For those who have NOT been dissed, eat your hearts out!
As for receiving a copy of the Goracle’s “Inconvenient Truth”. Well, as long as a cover letter explained that before it can be shown to British school children the teacher is required to tell them of the fallacies in it (I.e. lies). It would also be helpful if the cover letter pointed out:
The snows of Kilimanjaro are not melting from AGW but from deforestation.
The temperature increase this century is neither extreme nor unusual and that the temperature this last decade has been pretty much flat.
The glaciers in the Himalayas are not catastrophically melting,
That the sea level rise over the last two years has stopped.
That the stated correlation between AGW and increase of tropical storms is a lie.
That the Polar Bears are NOT drowning but thriving.
That the “Hockey Stick” graph is a fantasy construct.
That The Goracle Himself has made $100,000,000 from this hoax.
With that understanding, I would relish a copy of the “Inconvenient Truth”. I would also like a first edition of Paul Ehrlich’s book “The Population Bomb”. I read it back then and believed it (I was really stupid back then. I also smoked cigarettes and voted for Donks!) The predictions Ehrlich made (e.g. Great Britain would cease to exist by now and there would be massive world-wide famines) are so wildly wrong that it should be categorized as “humor”.
Anyway, I hold no ill will at being dissed by you. It just isn’t your fault! I expect that you went to public schools and were taught by Donks.
Steve C says: December 16, 2011 at 4:51 pm my reply: Probably so.
jim heath says: December 16, 2011 at 3:47 pm my reply: Well my brother has a PHD and is a Senior Research Scientist at ——-. But, he got his education at UC Berkeley. An uncle went to Berkeley in the 30’s. He was a really sweet, caring person. Yet, during that period Stalin was murdering literally millions of people in the Soviet Union (The Terror and the famine he engineered in the Ukraine), my uncle was studying Russian so that he could greet the Soviet troops when they came to liberate us. UC Berkeley hasn’t changed.
John West, Mardler, Halfwise, thanks for the suggestions.
Very best regards,
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
Leaving aside the question of whether “social justice” is “good politics”, the more basic question is how did the ostensibly “progressive” politics of the left end up entangled with the reactionary Luddites and Malthusians of the environmental movement?
RE: grzejnik says: Dec 16, 2011 at 2:25 pm and
LazyTeenager says: 3:42 pm
I for one find very believable the link between a major corporation slanting the news through a network it owns. The case is superbly made in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976)
Who knows, indeed. Mind you, Paddy wrote about television of which he knew well. That was before the internet was invented. Someday, I hope someone as talented will write “Inter-Network.”
John Garrett says:
December 16, 2011 at 3:12 pm
“Dear Mr. Ambler:
Try telling that to NPR (National Public Radio).
As best I can tell, wholesale, unquestioning belief in the hypothesis of CAGW appears to be a condition of employment there.”
I would call it Pavlovian but its spookier than that. It is something like an overwhelming, deeply embedded psychological need to live in a world of romance with heroes, villains, innocent victims, and the certainty that you know the only narrative that ends in happiness.