Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In the 19th century, British Prime Ministers used to say there were “lies, damned lies, and statistics”. In the 21st century, we may say there are frauds, serious frauds, and IPCC Assessment Reports.
Recall, for instance, the notorious graph in the Fourth Assessment Report that falsely indicated that the rate of global warming is accelerating and we are to blame. Using the same statistical dodge, one can show that a sine-wave has a rising trend.
In the Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC still cannot bring itself to behave. My expert review of an earlier draft of that report opened with these words:
“To restore some link between IPCC reports and observed reality, the report must address – but does not at present address – the now-pressing question why the key prediction of warming in earlier IPCC reports have proven to be significant exaggerations. The IPCC’s credibility has already been damaged by its premature adoption and subsequent hasty abandonment of the now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph as its logo; by its rewriting its Second Assessment Report after submission of the scientists’ final draft, to state the opposite of their finding that no discernible human influence on climate is detectable; by its declaration that all Himalayan ice would be gone in 25 years; and by its use of a dishonest statistical technique in 2007 falsely to suggest that the rate of global warming is accelerating. But the central damage to its credibility arises from the absence of anything like the warming it had predicted.”
The IPCC have indeed addressed The Pause. But they have addressed it by using statistical prestidigitation to air-brush it out. As Bob Tisdale has pointed out, the very first graphs the reader of the Summary for Policymakers will see are in Figure SPM.1, which consists of three panels. Each of these panels exploits bogus statistical techniques to vanish the pause.
Here is what They did and how They did it.
The first of the three panels shows the global instrumental surface temperature record since 1850:
And what is wrong with that? It looks innocuous enough, but a mathematician would take one look at it and sniff. He would see two things obviously wrong with drawing any conclusion about dangerously-rising 20th-century temperatures from this graph.
First, there is the aspect-ratio dodge. For the x axis is in years and the y axis is in Celsius degrees of temperature change. One can choose any aspect ratio one wants. To make 20th-century global warming look worse, just stretch the graph northwards.
Not all climate extremists know that. In a debate with me on Roy Green’s radio show in Canada a few years ago, one of the pointy-heads at TheSmugBlog asked the audience, with that earnest desperation in his voice that is mandatory, “But don’t you see how serious it is that global temperatures are rising at an angle of 45 degrees?”
I had to explain to the poor sap, as gently as I could, that degrees of arc and degrees of temperature change are clean different things.
But it is Dick Lindzen, whose vast experience and profound knowledge allows him to put the climate scare into perspective as no other can, who has best illustrated the insignificance of 20th-century global warming.
His local paper, the Boston Globe, prints the previous month’s temperature movements in the city. He has superimposed on that record an orange band that shows the entire warming of 0.75 Cº over the 20th century.
Even allowing for the fact that a global annual average will change less than a regional monthly one, it is difficult to look at Dick Lindzen’s orange band and draw the conclusion that 20th century global warming was alarmingly beyond the bounds of natural variability.
The second statistical dodge in the IPCC’s first panel is the error-bars dodge. If you look carefully at the error-bars in the IPCC’s graph, you will see that they are absent. Let us remedy that absence:
Even today, the combined measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties in the global terrestrial data are ±0.15 Cº. The uncertainties were far larger in the 19th century. Notice also how much less drastic and exciting the graph looks once the 2 σ uncertainty bounds are plotted.
There is a third dodge that is not directly evident from looking at the graph itself. All around the world the record-keepers have been rewriting the temperatures in the early 20th century to push them downward, so as to make the rate of warming over the century seem a great deal steeper than it was. Here, for instance, is New Zealand:
And Darwin Airport, Australia:
And the U.S. Historical Climate Network, before and after adjustment (this example and the next two are thanks to the vigilant Steven Goddard):
And the GISS record at Reykjavik, Iceland, before (left) and after adjustment (right):
And Santa Rosa, CA, this time with the trend-line added:
The effect of all these tamperings is to make it look as though there was more global warming in the 20th century than there was. Fortunately, there is not so much scope for the compilers of the terrestrial temperature records to tamper with what has happened since 1979, because the watching satellites now provide an independent record of global temperature change.
So to the second of the three mendacious panels in Figure SPM.1:
This graph is an illustration of a meme that has become a favorite with the apologists for Apocalypse: the most recent decade was warmer than earlier decades, so global warming is still getting worse (for the theology of the New Religion, standing common sense on its head, is that warmer weather is worse than cooler).
The priceless advantage of taking decadal averages, if one wants to magic the Pause away, is that it wipes out the entire trend of the most recent decade. One can dock off a further two years if, as here, one uses the decades 1991-2000, 2001-2010 etc. rather than 1993-2002, 2003-2012 etc. Finally, using decades docks off all the months of the current year. So this statistical dodge neatly erases the past 12 years 8 months of the Pause.
And, by what is perhaps more than a coincidence, the length of the Pause, taken as the longest period exhibiting a zero least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies on the three terrestrial datasets, is – er – precisely 12 years 8 months.
There is another and more subtle dodge here. As we saw in the earlier graph of the uncertainties in the HadCRUt4 global temperature dataset, the error bars narrow toward the present. The way the IPCC has presented the decadal blocks on the graph exploits this to make it seem that the blocks in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and noughties are much further apart than those in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s, implying without quite saying so that the rate of warming over the four most recent decades on the graph was significantly greater than the warming earlier in the 20th century.
Dick Lindzen, however, uses a graph that shows how little difference there is between the earlier and later periods of warming, even though it was only in the later period that we could have exercised much influence.
One panel shows the global temperature anomalies from 1895-1946. The other shows the anomalies from 1957-2008. Both cover 52 years. Both are plotted to an identical scale. Dick Lindzen asks his audiences whether they can tell which panel covers which period. It is not at all easy to tell.
Which brings us to the third panel. Here, the dodge is one of the newest in the arsenal of statistical shiftinesses on which the IPCC draws with such disfiguring frequency and relish. It is the use of colors, and bright ones at that, to try to suggest that the mild and beneficial global warming of the 20th century was grievous and alarmingly damaging.
And here the IPCC will find that it has made a mistake. Previously it has chiefly used bright colors in the red scale to indicate predictions of future planetary overheating. However, most people, on looking about them, will see remarkably little change as a result of 100 years’ warming. The trees are greener; the deserts have shrunk by quite a bit (the Sahara by 300,000 sq. km in 30 years); sea level is 8 inches higher; and that’s it.
Recoloring the graph in neutral tones would have been more scientifically adult:
Does the Earth really look that much different as a result of 0.7 Cº global warming over 100 years? Not really. Let us end with a God’s-eye view of the planet He has given us. Really, our stewardship has not left it in too much of a mess.
Yet.
Time and history will show our current crop of politicians, who are such firn advocates of AGW, to be either gullible idiots or con artists. I wonder if they appreciate that
Jean Parisot says: @ur momisugly September 17, 2013 at 4:42 pm
When the adjustments to the historical record are made – where is the meta-data documenting the rationale for the change, who did it, what the raw data was, etc. recorded?
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Since the adjustments can not be verified/validated they come under the “Creative Accounting” and not “science” department.
This alone tosses the IPCC report, and most of the ‘Climate Science’ peer-reviewed papers that rely on the unvalidated data, on the dung heap.
An excellent example is theWUWT post looking at a new study by Duke Univ., More settled science: Climate change/warming speeds up tree life cycles instead of causing migration
The entire study is based on the ASSumption that the adjusted temperature records are true. However the adjustments plus the MAP of movement of the Köppen climatic boundaries in the US Midwest show the entire study is compromised by the false appearance of an increase in temperature.
The correct conclusion of the study is:
A) The trees independently verify the Köppen climatic boundary map.
B) The raw temperature data showing no trend is correct and not the adjusted data.
C) CO2 is good for trees and makes them grow.
However the scientists conducting the study would have had to have correct scientific training and an open mind to reach these conclusions.
Barry Klinger says:
September 17, 2013 at 6:22 pm
How about 7.9F, 3.2F, and 3.5F? Those temperature differences also wouldn’t look too significant on a graph of daily Boston temperatures, but they represent the annual avg difference between Charleston SC and Washington DC, Washington and New York City, and NY and Boston, respectively. All cities with noticeably different climates even though their temperature ranges overlap significantly. So maybe, just possibly, small differences in climatological averages are more consequential than in day-to-day variations?….
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And you just showed those temperatures are all quite livable. However the more correct way of looking at it is “What happens if we DO commit economic suicide?”
Another commenter at WUWT….
Sasha says: @ur momisugly September 18, 2013 at 2:22 am …
WOW!
TRANSLATION:
The Science is settled can’t you understand? WE SAID SO! (We don’t want another IPCC report front and center that the sceptics can pick apart because we are afraid the climate is now going into cool the cycle and we can no longer ‘Hide the Decline’. Darn it ,you politicians were supposed to have made UN Agenda 21 a done deal by now and take credit for the coming decline in temperatures!)
Gail Combs: The article here is about whether IPCC is distorting the facts to make global warming seem big when it is actually small. Whether it is bad is another question but one we can’t even get to if we are still arguing about whether humans are even affecting the climate. For the record, I personally believe that an 8F global mean warming (which is not out of the question for the next century) might have some positive effects in cold places where few people now live, probably has negative affects in hot places where many people now live, and will probably be disruptive everywhere.
Gail, I assume your “deiundustralizing” scenario is for the US and no one else. If so it has the fallacy employed by all who want to do wrong. What is my little theft going to do to GDP? What is my can of motor oil going to do to the lake? What is one more boatload going to do to the fishery? Probably not too much, but the laws have to be designed to apply to everyone. If the world economy converts to low-emission technology, it will have a big effect on CO2 levels. But the whole world won’t do it if the richest country refuses to.
Earlier I commented on some fallacies in the article. Here are some more.
Early 20th century warming looks similar to late 20th century warming: The article dismisses anthropogenic affects in early 20th century, but according to the graphs from Hansen et al (2007, Clim Dyn), the change in radiative forcing was around 1/3 – 1/2 as big for 1st half of century as for 2nd half. That’s not negligible.
The article also talks about error bars. I think those error bars are for individual years. To the extent that errors for different years are random, the error bar for an average of N years should be decreased by a factor of sqrt(N). I think simply taking a 5 yr running mean gives the clearest picture of decadal and longer trends while eliminating year-to-year noise; for this the error bars should be reduced by about 2.2 which makes the long-term trend highly significant.
Of course the error bar argument cuts both ways. To the extent that error bars early in the century were larger, it is harder to make a case that apparent early 20th century warming disproves human effects for better-measured late 20th century warming!
The US won’t do it if doing so would be futile / insignificant and economically ruinous–plus indirectly causing more CO2 by encouraging off-shoring to countries with less efficient power plants and worse pollution standards. The US has indicted it would go along if the major emitting countries would also do so–but they’ve indicated they won’t.
“Doing wrong” in such a context is something that is not an absolute, but a relative. If the other major grazers on the global commons won’t agree to limit their access to it, we have no moral obligation to refrain.
Barry Klinger:
At September 18, 2013 at 4:49 am you assert
Converting “the world economy … to low-emission technology” requires a massive switch to nuclear power, together with reduction of economic activity resulting from higher transportation and agricultural costs. It could only be achieved by major reduction to the use of fossil fuels.
I fail to understand why anybody would want to do such an evil thing with all its resulting billions of deaths.
The use of fossil fuels has done more to benefit human kind than anything else since the invention of agriculture. This is because it has released us from the energy poverty of wind, solar and muscle (animal and slave) power. Human health, life expectancy and leisure have all increased with resulting increase to art, philosophy and knowledge. And the environment has benefited enormously.
That improvement was provided by use of fossil fuels and is sustained by use of fossil fuels. The developing world wants those benefits, too. At the moment they live at subsistence levels. Human population is set to reach a peak before declining around ~2050. That peak is anticipated to be an additional ~3 billion people and they need additional energy supply to survive. That additional energy supply is ONLY available by increased use of fossil fuels and nuclear power. But nuclear power provides electricity, not fuel. And not everything can be done by use of electricity: ask a farmer what his production would be if he had to replace it with a a Sinclair C5.
Without that additional energy supply ~3 billion people – mostly children – will die slowly and in pain from hunger and disease
If you don’t want the benefits of fossil fuels then fine: you swap places with somebody living in a mud hut and doing their cooking on a fire in the middle of the hut with the fire fueled by the wood and dung collected each morning.
We don’t want to lose those benefits: we want to enable those now living in mud huts to get those benefits, too.
Richard
Barry Klinger:
Your sophistry at September 18, 2013 at 5:01 am talks about “error bars” on global temperature determinations.
In reality, the error bars on each global temperature datum are infinite because average global temperature is an undefined metric with no possibility of calibration. Read this link, especially its Appendix B
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
The entire AGW-scare is based on meaningless fabrication.
Richard
“Using the same statistical dodge, one can show that a sine-wave has a rising trend.”
This is ironic because in fact it was a sine wave which caused the “acceleration”. Take a look at the first panel here. If you remove the contribution of the periodic component, the remaining temperature data has a constant .5 deg/century slope across the entire data set.
Gail Combs:
Could you give the source for the “Fifth Avenue” explanation? Although the source probably did not show his work, I for one would find it interesting if he did.
Barry Klinger says: @ur momisugly September 18, 2013 at 4:49 am
….. For the record, I personally believe that an 8F global mean warming (which is not out of the question for the next century) might have some positive effects in cold places where few people now live, probably has negative affects in hot places where many people now live, and will probably be disruptive everywhere….
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8F ~ 4.4C increase? NOT bloody likely!
First we are at the tail end of the Holocene and the Solar insolation seen at earth has been decreasing since the Holocene Optimum. graph and as shown the earth is slowly cooling in response.
Even Joe Romm over at Climate Progress states:
“Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit” — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds…”
This paper also agrees that we are at the point in the earth’s Milankovitch cycle that ushers in an ice age. The biggest question of course is why we are not covered in ice yet.
There are several other papers that come to a similar conclusion. We are near the time for glacial inception.
The second part of the argument against your statement was made by Dr Brown, (Physicist) of Duke University, about climate, Chaos Theory and a “strange attractor”, which is typically a limit point. No new strange attractors: strong evidence against both positive feedback and catastrophe
This Vostok graph of the last 450ky shows the upper and lower limits (strange attractors) that Dr. Brown is talking about and the tendency of the temperature to bounce between them. (There is a third some where between the upper and lower that is in response to Dansgaard–Oeschger events.)
Barry Klinger says:
September 18, 2013 at 4:49 am
…. Gail, I assume your “deiundustralizing” scenario is for the US and no one else…..
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No, the EU has also stated goals of cutting carbon dioxide by 80% by 2050 and Australia was also on board until the fools were voted out of office.
DavidG. Silver Ralph- You are talking nonsense. Paul was no Nazorean!!
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Sorry, I was going to let this one go. I was just having a bit of fun with Monkton’s over-zealous faith – which he tries to sneak into scientific comment, when he should know better and keep his beliefs to himself. But I do draw the line at believers who don’t know anything about the texts they are supposed to be beliving in.
Acts 24:5 says:
For we have found this man (Saul-Paul) a real pestilent fellow who stirs up dissension among all the Jews throughout the world, and he is a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes.
(King James version).
Hmm, I think that makes Saul-Paul a Nazarene, don’t you think??
.
Barry Klinger says: @ur momisugly September 18, 2013 at 4:49 am
…If the world economy converts to low-emission technology, it will have a big effect on CO2 levels. But the whole world won’t do it if the richest country refuses to….
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What happens to humans if we converts to low-emission technology (and do not use Nuclear or Hydro because they are also targeted by the ECOLOONS)
#1. We see the results of ‘Fuel Poverty’ already in the UK About 2,000 extra deaths were registered in just the first two weeks of March compared with the average for the same period over the past five years. ‘An increase in fuel costs and the extended winter means that more people are going to suffer, and more will be unable to afford to eat and heat their homes. It’s a scary prospect.’
#2. The WTO, according to Bill Clinton, intentionally stripped third world countries of their ability to produce their own food. “We Made a Devil’s Bargain”: Fmr. President Clinton Apologizes for Trade Policies that Destroyed Haitian Rice Farming We have already had food riots in 60 countries in 2008.
So what does a ‘low-emission technology’ do to farming?
In 1970, One farmer supplied 75.8 persons in the United States and abroad. In 1940, one farmer supplied 10.7 persons in the United States and abroad.
The average energy use per person for the USA is 335.9 million BTUs per person. In 1949, U.S. energy use per person stood at 215 million Btu. (This is when the USA changed from horses to tractors.) The U.S. in 1800 had a per-capita energy consumption of about 90 million Btu. If the USA reduces its energy consumption by 80% it equals 45.18 million Btu. HALF that used in 1890!
In a ‘low-emission’ society most people will have to work on farms and from actual experience I can tell you that first world people are pretty much useless for farming. So The WTO has wiped out third world farmers, (According to a study by Jose Romero and Alicia Puyana carried out for the federal government of Mexico, between 1992 and 2002, the number of agricultural households fell an astounding 75%) and without carbon based fuel first world farmers can not produce the food the world needs. So the result will be food riots and revolutions similar to 2008 but much much worse.
RIOTS and DEATH will be the actual results of trying to make first world citizens into third world peasants. Russia and China not being the idiots first worlders are will rise to dominate the rest of the world.
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Terry Oldberg,
There is a certain degree of playful subtlety in your comment. A not infrequent thing in your many comments and it causes a pause . . . to reflect.
Are you suggesting that the models are of such a nature (lacking events as their basis) that mathematical statistics cannot be applied to them?
Please expand your original comment. Thanks.
John
ralfellis:
Please desist from attempting to divert this thread from its subject.
In hope of stopping further discussion of your ‘red herring’, I write to answer your question in your post at September 18, 2013 at 6:33 am
No, it does not.
He was a tent maker who was a Roman Citizen from Tarsus, not Nazareth. This is why he was known as (S)Paul of Tarsus. He became leader of the Nazarene sect in their “trouble making” while he was among them, but that did not make him a Nazarene.
Let that be an end to this irrelevance to the thread.
Richard
Barry Klinger says: @ur momisugly September 18, 2013 at 4:49 am
… If the world economy converts to low-emission technology, it will have a big effect on CO2 levels. But the whole world won’t do it if the richest country refuses to.
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The final part of why lowering or keeping CO2 levels the same is idiotic.
First C3 plants, especially during glaciation are near starvation levels. Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern CaliforniaDepartment of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas
Second the consensus seems to be that higher CO2 levels are all that is keeping us out of glaciation.
As you may have notice some think we are headed into another solar minimum
We are already seeing a change in the weather patterns as the Jet Stream moves from zonal to meridional flow with blocking highs.
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Don’t confuse the the OT vow with the city of Nazareth. Jesus was called a Nazarene because that is where Joseph and Mary went with him after they returned from Egypt when he was young.
PS Philippians 3 has a bit on Paul’s background and how he valued it compared to what he really held dear.
Now can we keep this thread on track?
John Whitman:
I see that at September 18, 2013 at 6:53 am you again attempt to disrupt a thread this time by inciting Terry Oldberg to spew his repeatedly refuted (by Monckton, by rgb@duke, by me, by etc.) nonsense into this thread.
It can be anticipated that Terry Oldberg will jump at the invitation. If he does then I beg everybody to ignore it, otherwise he will drag this thread down into Alice’s rabbit hole as he has other threads.
Richard
Joe Born says: @ur momisugly September 18, 2013 at 5:46 am
Gail Combs:
Could you give the source for the “Fifth Avenue” explanation? Although the source probably did not show his work, I for one would find it interesting if he did.
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I really wish I could dig up who made the comment on WUWT but so far I haven’t been able to dig it out. All I can remember is that it was within the last week or two before September 16th. I will keep looking since it is such a great illustration and I really want to H/T the author.
Thanks to all who responded to my previous comments. We are all drifting a bit off-topic when we discuss what to do about rising GHG levels, so I will just say a few words about it here.
1) Is decarbonizing evil because it condemns the developing world to squalor? Not if done correctly. Currently in the US wind is economically competitive in some areas and needs a small subsidy in others. Solar is further away from breaking even but has been getting cheaper for a long time. Modest adaption of these and similar sustainable technologies + more efficient devices by rich countries now will speed the time when green tech becomes cheap enough for poor countries to use to expand their economies in a clean way. Saying that we need to keep using fossil fuel because it started the industrial revolution is like saying we need to keep the vacuum tube because it started the information revolution.
2) Does negotiating climate agreements fruitlessly doom the US economy? No, rich countries have an obligation to start first, but poor countries should be brought along, first in agreements about imports (so we don’t just offshore CO2 emissions) and (as they get richer) in curbing their own growth. That also gives time for (1) and for the science to be clearer.
3) Must we do our patriotic duty to spew CO2 to prevent the next ice age? In principle there may be some truth in that but in practice I think the huge rate of increase in GHG’s is way more than is needed to curb a multi-millenium trend in insolation.
Barry Klinger says:
September 18, 2013 at 7:47 am
1) Is decarbonizing evil because it condemns the developing world to squalor? Not if done correctly….
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First CO2 is up over 8% and there has been no increase in temperature for 17 years or so. The laboratory response curve is logarithmic, that is the first small amount has a major effect and the last much larger amount has a minor effect. It is like painting a window, only the first coat of paint has a really big effect on the amount of sunlight transmitted. We are now into the minor effect area akin to several coats of paint. That plus decreasing solar insolation makes the whole issue a tempest in a teapot only useful to academics sucking up grant money, financial investors and energy companies sucking up tax payer subsidies and bureaucrats salivating over more power.
Second The ONLY REAL alternate options are Hydro and Nuclear and you will get the Eco-loons screaming bloody murder if you try to build them. Besides we already have the Wild and Wonderful Rivers Act in the USA and the dismantling of dams occurring. So forget hydro.
As Richard Courtney said:
I suggest you read the rest of what he says HERE
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Richard,
Always a pleasure to here from you. Thanks for your comment, but your efforts to be a WUWT intellectual traffic director are completely unsolicited.
As you are free to say whatever you like (within this site’s policy) to anyone you wish it is also the case that I am likewise free to say whatever I like (within this site’s policy) to anyone I wish. N’est ce pas?
What site policy has Terry Olberg violated either in fact or in spirit with his comment (Terry Oldberg on September 17, 2013 at 9:20 pm)?
What site policy has John Whitman violated either in fact or in spirit with his comment (John Whitman on September 18, 2013 at 6:53 am)?
Has richardscourtney violated a site policy either in fact or in spirit with his comment (richardscourtney on September 18, 2013 at 7:04 am)?
I am here to learn, share, create, network and to get to understand better, for my part, some individuals. In Terry Oldberg’s climate science comments I often see philosophically (particularly in the area of epistemology) subtle premises as his basis. I, for my part, will try to get to know him better. And my comments to him will be sincere and polite.
John
Barry Klinger:
I am replying to only one point in your post at September 18, 2013 at 7:47 am because they are all spurious and I explained why your suggestion would kill billions. Your reply to that explanation is either out of La La Land or is a deliberate call for the deaths of billions.
It says
That is wrong in every particular!
Wind is only “economically competitive” because it is subsidised: it has competitive PRICE but its costs are 5 to 10 times those of gas, coal, and nuclear power.
Cost is Price + Subsidy
Solar is also exorbitantly expensive.
It is a physical impossibility for wind and solar to be as cheap as hydro, fossil fuels or nuclear. I explained this on another thread recently. I copy that explanation to here so you do not need to find it.
Renewables such as wind and solar cannot be cheaper than coal or other fossil fuel energy: it is physically impossible. I explain this as follows.
All energy is free. It was all created at the Big Bang. But it is costly to collect energy and to concentrate it for conduct of useful work.
Fortunately, nature has collected and concentrated energy for us.
For example, the little energy available in sunlight has been collected by photosynthesis over geological ages, and the collected energy exists in dry, compressed stores known as fossil fuels, notably coal.
The energy available in sunlight as it falls, or the solar energy collected as biomass is in such small amounts that collecting it costs much more than collecting the energy concentrated in fossil fuels.
Wind is also energy supplied by the sun but it is also too feeble in normal winds to make its collection affordable when the solar energy collected by fossil fuels is so much and is so concentrated.
However, hydropower is solar energy collected by evapouration over large areas which is concentrated when it falls as rain and is routed to rivers by geography. This large collection area makes hydropower affordable in competition with fossil fuels and nuclear power. (Nuclear power is energy concentrated by now long-dead stars).
The high concentration of energy in fossil fuels is why windpower and muscle power (from animals and slaves) were abandoned when the high energy intensity in fossil fuels became available for use as power by using of the steam engine.
But hydropower was not abandoned and is still used because the energy intensity in falling water is comparable to the energy intensity in fossil fuels.
In summation, collecting energy for use is cheap by using hydropower, fossil fuels and nuclear power because nature has done most of the collecting. But collecting energy is expensive from wind and solar because we have to do all the collection ourselves.
Wind and solar are ancient technologies which were surpassed over a century ago.
They were replaced by the steam engine. Your claim that they are capable of significant further development is plain daft. You are claiming the steam engine is future tech.!
I do not know if your desire to reduce fossil fuel usage is pure evil or is simple ignorance stupidity. But it is only necessary for the ignorant and stupid to promote evil for evil to prevail.
Richard