Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Originally published in Communities Digital News.
The year 2014 was another year of futility in the fight against climate change. Climatists redoubled efforts to convince citizens that urgent action is needed to stop dangerous global warming. But the gap between public warnings and actual events produced an endless stream of climate irony.
January began with a frosty bang as an arctic air mass descended on the central United States, following a similar event in December. What was once called a cold snap is now ominously christened a “polar vortex.” Record-low daily temperatures were recorded from Minnesota to Boston, along with all-time seasonal snowfalls in many cities.
In a White House video released on January 8, John Holdren, chief science advisor to President Obama, made the paradoxical statement, “But a growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”
Also in January, passengers of the research ship Akademik Shokalskiy were rescued after the ship was locked in ice for 10 days near the antarctic coast. The expedition lead by professor Chris Turney had intended to study how weather patterns near Antarctica were changing due to man-made global warming.
On February 16, during a presentation in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry stated that climate change was “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” Only two days later, protestors set fire to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, leading to the resignation of President Viktor Yanukovych. In March, Russia seized the Crimea. In July, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, and political unrest continues today. In the Middle East, slaughter of innocent civilians and beheading of western captives became a growing trend. Man-made climate casualties seem remarkably scarce in comparison.
In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations released Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, part of its Fifth Assessment Report. The report said that man-made climate change would reduce world agricultural output. Lead author Dr. Mark Howden stated, “There’s increasing evidence that climate change is also impacting on agriculture, particularly on some of the cereal crops such as wheat and maize. The negative impacts are greater and quicker than we previously thought.”
Meanwhile, farmers continued to ignore the warnings of the IPCC. According to the US Department of Agriculture, world agricultural production set all-time records for all three major cereal crops in 2014, with rice output up 1.1 percent, wheat up 11.2 percent, and corn up a whopping 14.0 percent over 2013.
The Obama administration continued its attack on coal-fired power plants, which provide about 40 percent of US electricity. In June, the EPA proposed new restrictions on carbon emissions that would make it virtually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant in the US. At the same time, more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned across the world, with two-thirds to be built in India and China.
In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the arctic ice could be gone in “as little as seven years.” But arctic sea ice rebounded in 2014 and antarctic sea ice has been growing for decades. According to the University of Illinois, satellites measured global sea ice area at above the 30-year average at the end of 2014.
In September, the United Nations held a climate summit in New York City to urge the world to conserve energy and reduce emissions. Spokesman Leonardo DiCaprio stated, “This disaster has grown beyond the choices that individuals make.” Mr. DiCaprio neglected to mention his frequent flights on carbon-emitting private jets or his ownership of the world’s fifth largest yacht, purchased from a Middle East oil tycoon.
In October, climate skeptics reported the eighteenth straight year of flat global temperatures. Satellite data shows no temperature increase since 1997. The “pause” in global warming is now old enough to vote or to serve in the military.
Hurricanes and tornados are favored events for generating alarming climate headlines, but US weather events were few in 2014. US tornadic activity was below average and the lack of strong hurricanes continued. No Category 3 or stronger hurricane has made US landfall for more than eight years, the longest period since records began in 1900.
The last half of 2014 witnessed a steep drop in world petroleum prices from over $100 per barrel to under $60 per barrel. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, technologies perfected by US geologists and petroleum engineers over the last two decades, produced an explosion in US oil production and triggered the fall in world prices.
But the concurrent drop in US gasoline prices to two dollars per gallon is not welcomed by man-made global warming believers. Former Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said in 2008, “So we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” English journalist George Monbiot has lamented, “We were wrong about peak oil: there’s enough in the ground to deep-fry the planet.”
With all the climate fun in 2014, what will 2015 hold?
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
“The “pause” in global warming is now old enough to vote or to serve in the military.”
Which branch of the armed forces would Mr. Pause choose to serve in? Maybe CCC; the new Climate Change Corps. It is trendy, it is fashionable, it can provide quick promotion. Best of all, it is a “cushy billet”, a comfortable service. War is a huge consumer of energy with equivalent co2-emissions. The mission of CCC is to avoid all this by staying put, doing as little as possible, preferably in a comfy bunk. A similar force which is being planned in the UK may include mandatory reading of the Guardian while on bunk-duty.
Fighting climate change demands a whole new attitude towards military thinking, it is a passive defence, a “corps in being”, to paraphrase the old naval expression. But it is not completely inactive. Regular drills include temperature adjustments according to the present tactical climate situation, and a comprehensive production of climate sit-rep documents. This is done in close cooperation with the UN International CC Brigade.
Weaponry, though scarce, will be in accordance with the CCC doctrine. All tanks and trucks, as well as the rather small air force, will be exclusively fuelled by solar power, limiting operations to sunny, clear days, thus underlining the focus on warfare-in-comfort.
Enemy forces will be defeated by consensus.
CCC is the service of the future. It has a uniqe appeal to the idealogically-minded and lazy-bodied new generation. Our motto is: “Obese, at ease!”
Join up, Mr. Pause!
Do not give them any ideas. But then again aren’t they trying to make “clean” energy using sh.t? And boy could you ever write a Sci-Fi using your post. I like the part about staying put in your bunk, reading the guardian,… oh wait that’s not SF.
Steve, good post and further to your opening comment “The year 2014 was another year of futility in the fight against climate change” I recently strayed into the “ClimateChange” area of Linked In. If I’m reading it correctly they claim 934 Groups and 331,482 people results.So this is an indication of the size of the warmist “army”. But what on earth do they all talk about within those 934 groups. It sounds like a real talking heads paradise..
Over my long life I have seen that the collectivists hate cheap energy as it is energy that allows us to create wealth in the industrialized world. By that I mean feed, clothe, and house our large populations. Take away cheap energy and you will have people dieing off by the millions — which may well be the objective of the “world savers”.
Over my long life I have seen the so-called “greens” seek to vilify the very industrialization that they themselves love to use. Al Gore did not decided to buy a small two bedroom bungalow and drive an old Versa car. Al Gore wants you to economize but not himself. Why? He sees himself as part of an elite that will save the world by population reduction on a massive scale.
The CO2 causes global warming meme is the dominate idea in the world today. Even most of the skeptical side believes this is true — they just argue that the amount of warming has been overestimated, that warming is good, or both.
I am afraid that we will not take an honest look at what CO2 really does in my lifetime. We will not look at what Maxwell and so many other greats said about what makes the atmospheric effect work until this present meme is put to rest. When will that be? I have no idea as the truth seems to have darn little effect in this debate.
A good post from a while back by the “Scottish Sceptic” talks about how good physics can be lost if the PR is bad. It is a good, short read. I like to say that the truth is ill served if you don’t know how to present it properly. http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2014/07/04/skydragons-good-physics-appalling-pr/
Never forget, we are not just discussing science here — we are engaged in a major political war with those who would destroy our modern, industrialized civilization.
” we are engaged in a major political war with those who would destroy our modern, industrialized civilization.” It’s statements like this that make it apparent the poster has no interest in science, but eschews facts in order to promote a preconceived, inflexible (and in this case, spectacularly inaccurate) ideological worldview.
The fact is that even if AGW were nonexistent, the fossil fuels are the buggy whip industry of the 21st century; outdated,inefficient, expensive and only being kept alive because powerful people have trillions of dollars invested in infrastructure and reserves. And the inevitable shift or collapse in the energy business will not only not destroy industrial civilization, it will allow it to reach new heights thanks to reduced cost and vastly greater efficiency. The real risk is that the West will fall behind as Asia jumps ahead in adopting the next generation of technology.
I see Sir Harry Flashman is totally educated in the field of economics as well as history.
At one point in time Mr. Flashman would have told us that whale oil was going to run out and we would all perish because of that. Some, like Flashman, have never heard of innovation.
Thanks for making my point. There was no disaster when we ran out of whale oil, and there will be no disaster when we stop using fossil fuels. The technological alternatives already exist.
the fossil fuels are the buggy whip industry of the 21st century; outdated,inefficient, expensive
Well I am mystified. Could you explain what energy sources are more efficient and less expensive than fossil fuels? In your answer, don’t forget to differentiate between generation of electricity and transportation as they are different root problems, and the bulk of fossil fuel use is actually the latter.
Sir Harry Flashman;
There was no disaster when we ran out of whale oil, and there will be no disaster when we stop using fossil fuels. The technological alternatives already exist.
We didn’t run out of whale oil. It became uncompetitive in comparison to other options which emerged in the market, so we stopped collecting the stuff. We’ll stop using fossil fuels when something more cost effective comes along to replace them. If you think there is some secret cabal preventing us from doing that, then you are free to do so. The more you screech that there IS such a secret cabal, the more I have to wonder why the cabal continues to let you screech on and doesn’t protect itself by doing something about you.
No, post US Civil War there was a whale oil shortage which accelerated the move to petroleum. Google it.
As far as more efficient, there have been numerous studies done recently showing renewables are now competitive with coal and even natural gas in most markets ( here’s one article, there are many, many more http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/energy-environment/solar-and-wind-energy-start-to-win-on-price-vs-conventional-fuels.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0). There will continue to be a need for other forms of power generation until storage technology catches up, but that will probably be within a decade. And we’re certainly not going to convert our transportation infrastructure to electrics in the next 20 years or more. But it will happen.
I think there is a cabal, but it’s not secret by any means. What they want to do, quite understandably, is hold off on the new technologies until a) they can own them and b) they’ve used up all the reserves they can dig up for burning. Unfortunately this effort is of no value to parts of the world that haven’t got expensive centralized power grids already built out, who will jump directly into cheap distributed power. Ultimately, anyway who doesn’t get on this bandwagon is going to be uncompetitive.
Also, burning all the reserves will destroy human civilization via climate change, so there’s that.
Sir Harry;
As far as more efficient, there have been numerous studies done recently showing renewables are now competitive with coal and even natural gas in most markets
LOL. If that were true, then power utilities would be flocking to them. China and India would not be building on the order of 2 coal fired power plants per month (each!), they’d be building the more efficient options instead. If that were true, there would be no reason for the World Bank to refuse loans to countries that want to build coal fired power plants since they would be asking for loans for the cheaper alternatives instead.
I think there is a cabal, but it’s not secret by any means.
Go into the kitchen. Go through the drawers and cupboards until you find the one with those long thin boxes with rolls of various different materials in them. You’ll want the one with the shiny stuff on one side…
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/19/china-aiming-install-1300-mw-new-renewable-energy-capacity-week/
“China’s renewable energy ambitions are starting to become more clear thanks to a number of recent announcements — perhaps the most important takeaway of this new clarity is the revelation that the government there is aiming to install roughly 1300 MW of new renewable energy capacity a week, in order to meet the country’s goal of getting 20% of its electricity via renewables by 2030.
The main thing to keep in mind when thinking about those figures is that that’s roughly the same amount of new generating capacity as provided by the coal power plants that China has been installing rapidly over the last few years. ”
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/09/india-eyes-100-billion-investment-renewable-energy/
That said, given the growth trajectories of these economies, coal will be a big part of the mix for a while. Unless renewables get even cheaper as the technology continues to evolve. Which it will.
The idea that fossil fuel companies want to preserve their profits and will work against renewables to do so isn’t so much tin foil hat as common sense, You or I would likely do the same thing.
“Fossil Fuels?” I guess you have not heard of the newer theories on the origins of Petroleum? While I’m skeptical about Russia’s “Abiotic Oil” theories, the “Deep Biosphere” theory has a much more realistic base. IOW, we are not running out of oil, as it’s still being produced, constantly.
As to your “outdated,inefficient, expensive and only being kept alive because powerful people have trillions of dollars invested in infrastructure and reserves” statement; what do you suggest we replace this outdated product with? Rainbow-voltaic cells and Unicorn treadmills?
Sir Harry Flashman
You write: “ What they want to do, quite understandably, is hold off on the new technologies until a) they can own them and . . .; and then you write: “The idea that fossil fuel companies want to preserve their profits and will work against renewables to do so . . .”
Pardon my saying so, but I don’t think you are up to speed on the subjects you write about.
A company once known as British Petroleum renamed itself as BP.
Then it branded itself as “Beyond Petroleum” and invested $8 Billion between 2005 and 2013 on alternative energy projects. BP has 7 wholly owned wind farms, shares in 9 more, and operates 14 of the 16.
I could go on.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Quite right – as I say these businesses are not stupid – they can see what’s coming, and they want to own the new technologies. However, they also want to turn a profit from the old technology until the last possible drop of fossil fuels have been extracted and burned. Which is where our interests diverge.
Sir Harry Tin Foil Flashman
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/19/china-aiming-install-1300-mw-new-renewable-energy-capacity-week/
From your own link:
The 1300 MW a week (averaged out) figure comes to us via the recent “climate deal” between China and the US —
You really have to understand the difference between a purely political announcement and actual facts on the ground.
The idea that fossil fuel companies want to preserve their profits and will work against renewables to do so isn’t so much tin foil hat as common sense,
And what, exactly, is preventing power utilities from choosing these lower cost alternatives? You can’t claim regulation, because regulation is the thing that is keeping them from building more coal fired power plants in the first place. Coercion? Do you think the fossil fuel companies are blackmailing their customers into buying higher cost systems? Bribery perhaps? What? What exactly compels multi-billion dollar organizations from making low profit / high cost choices when high profit / low cost choices are available to them?
Tighten up the tin foil before you answer.
Dave, you’re kind of a patronizing prick, but you make essentially rational arguments,which on this site I appreciate.
Major change occurs in stops and starts, and is paradoxically often most vehemently rejected by those who have the most reason to understand and embrace it. The British navy kept sailing ships in service for decades after steam had become the predominant means of nautical propulsion; an internal memo from Western Union in 1876 said “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”
Renewable energy will be the greatest transformation since the Industrial Revolution, and equally beneficial to humanity. Ironically the oil and gas proponents, the innovators who powered that change, are the Luddites of this one.
Beyond that, there are myriad reasons why renewables aren’t chosen by everyone everywhere – inertia, limited understanding, fixed vs variable cost requirements, suitability for the required task, political pressure, tax breaks, availability of the technology, personal connections (“guangxi” being particularly important in China), time to market etc etc. It’s certainly not a clearcut choice at this point, but I suspect in ten years it will be.
Sir Harry Flashman December 31, 2014 at 6:19 am
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah sure. Want more examples? The quartz movement was invented by a Swiss engineer, who couldn’t get a single watch company in Switzerland, which totally dominated the watch industry at the time, to consider it. So he sold the idea to Seiko and Japan now dominates the watch industry and has made billions from it. Xerox invented computing as we know it today, but concluded that it was impossible to sell things like a GUI and a mouse and ethernet, so they shut down the projects and essentially gave away the technologies to companies like Apple, digital and 3Com who made billions from them. There was a guy at 3M who invented yellow stickies but had the project cancelled because the executive couldn’t see a use for them. There was a revolt among the executive assistants when the samples ran out and they found out that their bosses had cancelled the project. The project got refunded and turned into one of 3M’s greatest success stories.
I make my living showing companies how to transition from old technologies to new ones, I have many stories like these. But the bottom line is that inventions that provide a competitive advantage are adopted not by what’s called “early adopters” to gain an advantage over “late adopters”. The “late adopters” are resistant to change, a problem that will either cost them market share or drive them to bankruptcy when disruptive new technologies emerge.
Your problem is that you have bought in to the hype of “renewables” being cost effective. They simply aren’t. They are unreliable, expensive, inefficient, and they have to be backed up by conventional means to solve their inherent problems, and the conventional back up systems cost as much to have around as the renewables they are backing up. That’s why the only companies using these as sources of power are in fact “late adopters” who have been persuaded to do so by regulatory fiat or tax incentives. There are now early adopters appearing in the market of their own volition. Even Google, the quintessential early adopter, spent a fortune trying to build their own energy infrastructure from renewables, and failed.
But back to your very first example. When steamships showed up, it took the traditional sailing ships a long time to die off, just as you said. But sailing ships simply could not compete with fossil fuel driven steam ships on reliability, speed, cost effectiveness (even with wind as free fuel!) and other factors, so sailing ships disappeared along with wind mills for pumping water and grinding grain and other applications.
Yet here you are theorizing that perhaps wind and other renewables can make a comeback on the myth that putting a power generation station in between the wind and the motor changes anything in a meaningful way.
It doesn’t.
There are NO early appearing in the market of their own volition.
I haven’t had my first coffee yet, and have not yet got control of all my fingers.
There are no early adopters appearing in the market of their own volition.
“In October, climate skeptics reported the eighteenth straight year of flat global temperatures. Satellite data shows no temperature increase since 1997. The “pause” in global warming is now old enough to vote or to serve in the military.”
This bothers me somewhat. I’m an ‘oldie’ aged 66, with a scientific and technical education and career behind me.
We have a generation of young people raised under the influence of all the alarmist nonsense propaganda, who are probably convinced that the global climate has changed and that this is the result of the evil gas CO2.
Or are they? Has traditional youthful scepticism of what adults tell them won out?
Would any youngsters reading this site care to comment?
2014 is on track to be the warmest on record, and sea surface temperatures are at a record high. Weather in the northern hemisphere is getting more extreme, with hurricanes tracking farther north (with some locations seeing record low pressures), due to Arctic amplification — the Arctic warming faster than the tropics and mid-latitudes.
Bingo. The WUWT-ers can cherry-pick data and use it to draw all the cutesy graphs all they want, but the warming that’s going on up north is obvious, dramatic and undeniable.
You’ve cherry-picked your data sets in order to arrive at a supposed projected “warmest on record”. Unfortunately, the projected warmest would only be by a few hundredths of a degree. Since the margin for error on these type of calculations is a tenth of a degree, your “warmest” is really statistically insignificant from the previously warmest year.
The temperature record is only 150 years old, which is “the blink of a young girls eye” in terms of geologic time. Recorded temperatures have all occurred while the earth was warming from the Little Ice Age. The Midieval Warming, Roman Warming, Minoan Warming & Holocene Warming all occurred before records began. The Cambrian, Devonian, Triassic, Jurassic & Cretaceous were all significantly warmer than today.
Technically, we are in an interglacial period of the Quaternary glaciation which is also known as the current ice age.
Within this context your claim of a projected, biased, statistically insignificant “warmest on record” seems pretty lame.
Like this warming: The huge warming of the Arctic that started in the early 1920s and lasted for almost two
decades is one of the most spectacular climate events of the 20th century. During the peak
period 1930-1940 the annually averaged temperature anomaly for the area 60°N-90°N
amounted to some 1.7°C.
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/publikationen/Reports/max_scirep_345.pdf
“Arctic temperature anomalies in the 1930s were apparently as large as those in the 1990s and 2000s. There is still considerable discussion of the ultimate causes of the warm temperature anomalies that occurred in the Arctic in the 1920s and 1930s.” – IPCC AR5 Chapter 10
Eve,
Says … “The huge warming of the Arctic that started in the early 1920s” … and so on.
This is easily explained by the following information:
The “… first practical working motor toboggan went into production between 1922-26.”
http://www.upsnowmobiling.com/1st-snowmobile
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
My bold.
http://www.komonews.com/weather/blogs/scott
“An intense high pressure system centered over British Columbia spilled into Western Washington Tuesday morning, making for the highest atmospheric pressure readings on record across the region.”
Above is a reply to Barry at 7:17.
http://iceagenow.info/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Global_sea_ice_extent_30Dec20141.png
It’s so warm that global sea ice is expanding just in time for those exotic tropical drinks we enjoy! Three Cheers for Mai Tais!!
The article listed some unusual weather events in 2014.
They didn’t happen in 2013.
That means the climate changed from 2013 to 2014.
Proof that climate change is real.
.
In 2015, I expect the computer gamers will announce every climate change
from 2013 to 2014 was caused by humans, and they know that “for sure” which they
will call a 105% confidence level (formerly 95% confidence, and since the confidence level,
whatever that means, is in a long term rising trend, I have estimated 105% confidence for 2015,
and 110% confidence for 2016 (+/1 three percentage points).
based on my computer confidence level model (I didn’t just make up these numbers,
or copy them from the back of Art Laffer’s napkin)).
Please Sir Harry, my Baloney Detector has charred itself to my wall!
Attention Mr.Modi, Global leaders and UNFCCC: To conserve about 40% of fuel & thereby reduce carbon emissions, to control climate change and global warming, to prevent road crash deaths and save millions of people from pollution related diseases and to reduce 80% of traffic jams, to uplift the downtrodden and reduce economic inequalities etc. for the first time in the world, I POSSESS A WIPO APPROVED, NO-NONSENCE MIRACLE INVENTION. But, is there anybody in India and the world who can help me to dedicate this PANACEA to humankind? Please Mail to: *vthoorun.rcrv@gmail.com *
I think there’s a Prince in Lagos that is more than willing to help you in this regard. All he will need is your bank routing number…
You forgot hottest year ever. Just saying.
“Meanwhile, farmers continued to ignore the warnings of the IPCC. According to the US Department of Agriculture, world agricultural production set all-time records for all three major cereal crops in 2014,” Apparently farmers have had the audacity to produce record yields despite warnings of impending doom from the IPCC. What are they supposed to do, refuse to plant and sit in sackcloth and ashes because some clown with a computer model says that successful agriculture is bad for the environment?
Professional climatologists habitually avoid the possibility of gaps between public warnings and actual events through avoidance of identification of these events. Thus, for example, their models issue non-falsifiable “projections” rather than falsifiable “predictions.”
Lake Superior’s starting to freeze again, the ships are heading for their winter berths.
https://www.facebook.com/wdiowirt/photos/pcb.10152638804531167/10152638799361167/?type=1&theater