CREDIT Patrick Mansell, Penn State
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The part I don’t get – why is it important to greens not to “fall behind”?
Climate Change Impacts ‘No Longer Subtle,’ Scientist Says
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Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson talks with Michael Mann (@MichaelEMann), distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.
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“What we’re seeing right now across the Northern Hemisphere is extreme weather in the form of unprecedented heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires. In isolation, it might seem like any one of these things could be dismissed as an anomaly, but it’s the interconnectedness of all these events and their extreme nature that tells us that we are now seeing the face of climate change. The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle.
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“That’s a huge lost opportunity when the media does not connect those dots for the people, because this is the face of climate change, and we have to understand it’s not just about polar bears up in the Arctic. It’s about extreme damaging weather events that we’re experiencing now in real time.”
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“So the world is moving on, and the question now is, simply, is the United States going to join the rest of the world in what is the great economic revolution of this century, the green energy revolution, or are we going to fall behind the rest of the world? That’s the decision that we have to make, and if we don’t like the path that we’re on right now with the Trump administration and Republican leadership in Congress, we’ve got a midterm election in less than 100 days, where we can speak out and say, ‘We want a different path. We want to join the rest of the world, rather than be the last holdout towards progress.’ ”
Read more: http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/08/02/summer-weather-climate-change
Why is it so important to greens for the USA not to “fall behind” the alleged renewable energy revolution?
Back in 2014, an engineering team working for Google discovered to their horror that there is no economically viable path to 100% renewable energy. No matter what they tried, the cost of building all the green energy infrastructure which would be required to get anywhere close to 100% renewable energy was an insurmountable barrier.
Spending money on green energy R&D – I don’t have a problem with that. But spending money on green energy infrastructure is a high risk investment in an unready technology which currently has no chance of delivering. Even Google’s engineers couldn’t crack the problem.
My question – instead of risking national economic ruin by trying to jump to the front of the pack, why not continue with the status quo? Encourage US entrepreneurs servicing the technology needs of green states and other countries to solve the problems, without risking the national economy.
That way countries or states which are enthusiastic about solar and wind take the risks, while states which are less enthusiastic about green energy provide an economic safety net in case the green energy revolution doesn’t work out.
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It’s better to fall behind than fall over the cliff.
Climate alarmist seem to fail to understand the concept of forward and backwards. I think they have lost their sense of direction, and I suspect they never had one which accounts for their willingness to grab at anything that drifts by.
Perhaps I missed the announcement where we had determined returning to dreadful past lifestyles (nasty, brutish and short) was progress.
They’ve also missed the direction of causality: “climate change” can’t CAUSE anything; rather, a persistent, 30-year pattern of changed weather is the DEFINITION of climate change.
One mayas well say “wet sidewalks cause rain.”
Try to explain that to Michael (The Lemming) Mann
Sage advice from my Grandpa
“If all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you do it?”
If all your friends stop at the traffic lights
would you do it
When the lights are green, no.
Would you?
That reminds me of an old joke a friend of mine once told me:
A couple of guys where taking a drive through town at night. They came to a red light and the driver flew through it. The passenger was quite upset: “What the heck are you doing you just ran through a red light”. The driver said, relax, it’s no big deal, my brother does it all the time”.
They come up to the next red light and same thing happens. Passenger again says: “you did it again, that was a red light”. The driver responded “relax, my brother does it all the time”.
Next they come to a green light and the driver slams on the breaks bringing the car to a screeching halt. The passenger says “why’d you do that, the light is green?” to which the driver replied “My brother might be coming the other way.”
There’s a small but subtle difference between leading edge, and bleeding edge.
and between leading edge and bleeding stupid.
Greg, calling something stupid is childish & immature. Indicates you lost the argument.
beng135, sometimes one must call a spade a spade. If something is stupid, pretending otherwise won’t change the facts.
And BTW, calling someone childish & immature, that indicates you lost the argument – by your own standards.
Perhaps this is a reasonable case for 0bama’s policy of “leading from behind”, so that we can see what tomfoolery masquerading as STEM does to cause havoc to other nations and avoid it ourselves.
US will join the green energy revolution when
1. it’s cost effective,
2. won’t raise energy prices to the consumer and
3. isn’t subsidized by the Federal Government (which we pay for)
I for one don’t want to pay $0.30 to $0.40/KwHr like the EU.
I agree with one ‘correction’.
3) ‘our tax money’ should be changed to ‘our grand and great grandchildren’s tax money’, we spent our tax money and our children’s tax money long before they were born.
Politicians have been spending the children’s and grand children’s tax money since FDRs day.
According to Galbraith, it doesn’t matter what happens down the road since after all, “in the long run, we’re all dead”.
Please excuse my pendantry, but it was John Maynard Keynes who wrote, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
But they were both practitioners of horrible economics.
Please excuse my pedantry, but the right spelling of pedantry is pedantry not pendantry.
I think you win!
“In the long run, we’re all dead.”
But, your progeny.
Exactly. It’s one of the most disgusting things the state does. No private entity would ever do this.
No private enterprise could do this.
Nor would government allow them to.
Yes, D.C., but it is for our children and grandchildren’s own good. NOT!
We could make it ‘cost effective’ with an ‘Apollo’ or ‘Manhattan’ effort to reduce the cost of nuclear power plants. Cheap, safe, reliable nuke power would make fossil fuels obsolete very quickly, at least for power generation.
Thorium is the ticket
MSR is the ticket. Thorium is an unnecessary complication for centuries if not millennia.
Sparky … SPARKY – take a look at the (inaptly named, though it is) Suncell ..
It is intended to stop warming that isn’t happening! I’m not signing on regardless.
A ‘side benefit’ would be a reduction in the ‘real’ pollutants’ (benzene, mercury, etc) that burning fossil fuels generates, yes? I think there is a lot to be had to converting to non-fossil fuel power generation, as long as we correctly balance ‘risk/reward’.
Those were for most part eliminated decades ago.
My understanding is that benzene still has very real health effects on populations.
https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/benzene.html
What exposure does exist, doesn’t come from power plants.
I’d present Dr Mann with my dissenting views, only he blocked me long ago. I don’t even know why he did so.
Some people on social media make use of apps that pre-block large numbers of people for simply liking or viewing the “wrong” person elsewhere.
Could be the reason. I do recall asking him a question on his TL (respectfully, something like “Sir, I don’t understand, can you enlighten me as to why..)) that may have prompted him to block me because I am not ‘of the body’. It’s why I deleted my ‘facebook’ account after they assigned me a ‘political persuasion’ I had no control over, didn’t agree with, and couldn’t ‘opt out’ of. I also switched from Google search to ‘DuckDuckGo’ (not perfect, but better. If Twitter goes forward with their current plans to ‘reduce ‘hate speech’, etc, I will regretfully abandon that as well. The age of dominance by ‘Big Corp’ is upon us. I don’t know that government is capable of (or even wants to) stopping them anymore.
Ayn Rand wrote a little novella about the aftermath of just such government alliteration
Gab is a Twitter alternative that takes free speech seriously.
Oddly, the Green renewable snake-oil sellers seem to avoid talking about reliability in energy delivery when discussing renewable sources for electricity. /s
Reliability is the fatal flaw in the Green’s push for renewable power. Because lacking reliability, means either 1) people, businesses, and industry will either endure black-outs, and/or 2) endure much higher electricity costs as the grid operators duplicate power delivery with fossil fuel generators to mitigate #1. And duplicating means most of the claimed CO2 emissions savings is lost when entire systems level view is taken. The Google engineers took into account the total life-cycle CO2 fossil fuels used costs of renewable sources: the mining more copper and lithium for generators and batteries, the wind turbine production, the transport, installation. They can’t change that. They can only avoid discussing it.
We can’t let them get away with that.
Somewhere along the way they seem to have lost contact with the fact that the laws of physics prohibit us having perpetual motion devices, perpetual motion processes or perpetual motion systems.
The reason is they don’t give a fig about sufficient, reliable power. They ‘give a fig’ about what control over our energy brings them – total control over our lives.
Reliability is a secondary issue to me. The requirement for storage effectively doubles the cost of ALL Green power. Buying a truck to drag your dead horse around in.
Elon Musk will build a battery capable of powering the entire North American grid for a month, to protect us against fickle winds and sunshine. The battery will be the size of Rhode Island and it will contain all the rare earths, lithium and cobalt that the world can produce for the next 150 years.
/sarc
“a huge lost opportunity when the media does not connect those dots for the people”
*because ‘the people’ are all too damn stupid to connect them themselves*
I think the ‘media’ has been trying (and failing) to ‘connect the dots’ for quite some time, but, ‘the people’ seem to have an innate ‘BS’ meter about stuff like this.
Is Mann really a “scientist”.
Theorise.
Experiment.
Produce your propostion.
Give other scientists your data in order to produce the same results and prove your proposition.
In answer to your question Mann, by refusing to release his data, is not a scientist.
Careful what you say about the Mann, he is liable to open up a can of wuss-ass on you
He is a fraudster.
Bring it on Mikey.
One of the main fraudsters of the the biggest fraud of all time.
Fraudster or not, as Mark Steyn notes the process is the punishment when it comes to dealing with Mann’s frivolous liable suits.
Thomas: You didn’t use a “?”, but if it were a question, my answer is this- he is at most a very flawed scientist. Even if he is the Einstein of Atmospherics, does that translate to expertise in energy production? Don’t get me wrong, alarmists like to say “if your not a peer-reviewed climate scientist, your facts don’t count.” Mann can have an opinion, but how does he account for Google’s failure? I didn’t read the full article, but I’m sure Jeremy Hobson really grilled him on it. A journalist, right? Bet he challenged him, “are you an authority on electric grids and the like, Dr. Mann?” Right?
Mike Mann is an Activist
If – repeat IF – we finally see cost-effective renewable energy generation and storage on an industrial scale, it will be most rapidly adopted by those economies that are prosperous…… not those which have impoverished themselves chasing green dreams.
It’s pretty standard politics to assert that other nations are doing something better and we have to act now to catch up, or risk suffering dire consequences. It’s normal to hear it from politicians, so when you hear it from an alleged scientist you know that this person probably has an agenda and is mixing politics with their day job, probably to the detriment of their science.
I’ll also bet he didn’t mention the shockingly high, and rising, electricity prices enjoyed by the unlucky citizens of these other ‘green’ nations.
“Mr. President, we cannot afford a mine shaft gap!!!”
— Gen. Turgisson, “Dr. Strangelove (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb”)
Canada just scaled back it’s carbon taxes ( which haven’t even come into effect yet) due to international competitive issues ( read re-election issues for Trudeau). Very possibly a preliminary step to dropping them altogether.
Multiple provinces are taking the Feds to court to stop the taxes and the political opposition to Trudeau’s fatuous, posturing nonsense is growing.
People might vote stupidly but they’re also kinda fickle.
Not sure what Dr Mann is referring to as ‘behind’. Since every nation that has adopted the idea of the ‘Green Revolution’ has actually increased it’s CO2 from power generation (for various reasons) while the US has decreased it’s CO2 from power generation, perhaps Dr Mann wants the US to not ‘fall behind; and increase our CO2?
With most things being manufactured in China, it is difficult to know the actual contribution to CO2 any country makes in their well-intentioned shift to renewable power. I have long felt that the accounting for things like solar panels miss a lot of energy inputs for the complete life cycle.
The analysis of the life cycle for PV has been carried out many times.
This one here is a meta-analysis, summarizing the results, full of data:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311170056_Solar-PV_energy_payback_and_net_energy_Meta-assessment_of_study_quality_reproducibility_and_results_harmonization
If it were such an exciting field of opportunity there is nothing stopping Michael Mann or anyone else risking their own capital on non-government-sponsored so-called green energy developments.
Genuinely exciting technological developments don’t need government mandates, in fact quite the opposite, fortunes are made ‘getting in on the ground floor’.
The world’s #1 snake oil salesman! The only left out was unprecedented sameness! This guy should go work on a ranch. I’ve never seen a human being shovel so much s#!t!
One of the very few people in the world who I find disgusting.
As soon as that fraud Michael Mann mentioned the polar bears he lost all credibility.
He wouldn’t make a scientist’s arse hole.
Really smart people at the top of their field must be annoying.
If I get to vote, it will be to “fall behind”.
If I get to vote it will be to Push them farther ahead and away
Bryan A,
Put then all on the ‘B Ark.’
+ 42 !
Gets my vote
Politicians need to be seen doing something, anything, or why else elect them ?
If we need any more proof that there is not going to be enough electricity:
Smart meters will allow energy firms to introduce “surge pricing”, one of Britain’s biggest gas and electric providers has admitted for the first time.
Were these the dots you’re connecting Mr Mann?
From here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/30/smart-meters-will-let-companies-change-cost-electricity-every/
Meanwhile Brexit rumbles on towards a total trainwreck:
A drugs giant is amassing a 14-WEEK medicine stockpile as fears grow of a “nightmare” no deal Brexit. Pharmaceutical giant Sanofi is a major supplier of insulin.
From The Mirror somewhere.
Insulin eh?
Any pre-diabetics out there had better start eating and stocking up on the coconut oil
Wonder how the continental inter-connectors will fare in this mess – even less elektrickery for your average punter?
I’m sure the creators of Smart Meters have that one worked out, probably involving truckloads of £20 notes and Drax power station
Those smart meters rely on getting a signal to the outside world. Quite a lot of them can’t get a signal from the cupboard under the stairs. Just saying.
The United States of America is leading the world out of the mann-made dark ages of climate change fraud and into a new age of low cost, abundant, 24/7/365 reliable energy.
To the rest of the world: “Follow the Leader!”
Mikey looks worried that he can’t hide his decline. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMqc7PCJ-nc
His decline? I thought it was his Declination or was it his Reclination
“Green energy revolution”?
Bahahahahahaha!
Any more of this spin around energy and I’ll be green in the face.
We should offer to send Mann to Zimbabwe or some other such beacon of enlightenment where he can don his golden mantle of Eco Saviour and be fed peeled grapes while he looks down his nose at us common, ignoramuses. (Ignorami?)
“The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle.”
My, my, so until now they were, in Mann’s view, subtle? In stark contrast to the maistream alarmist propaganda, that would be.
It is Mann who is falling behind, he should read more on this site and get updated about the fate of renewable energy projects and policies worldwide. But that would be an intrusion of reality upon illusion, and possibly dangerous.
Perhaps just His falling behind
They never minded the US falling behind in the arms race.
Meanwhile, back in the real world of productive America…
Of course Mikie never was much into reality.
Great sign!
Did you take that pic? Love to use it in future for WUWT posts.
Yes, I took it (actually my wife did for me) and hereby release it to the public domain. Have at it. Location is at the intersection of hwy 46 and 50 about 6 miles East of Wagner, SD. This is looking East from the stop sign on hwy 50. If I had panned 90 deg left to the North there is a large wind farm a few miles North-North-West busily chopping up raptors and annoying the locals.
Why isn’t there a big discussion about nuclear energy. If climate change is such a disaster in the making why aren’t the alarmists talking about the only real option of less carbon and that is nuclear power. In their minds is it better to destroy the planet than use nuclear power? I don’t get it.
To his credit, James Hansen does call for lots more nuclear power, but he seems to be in a small minority among global-warmers and he got called the D-word by Oreskes for the sin.
His problem is that they were only too happy to recruit the most rabid of environmentalists and other assorted loud mouths as climate-change shock troops. There really are some allies who are just not worth the trouble. These same people have been brought up on a diet of undiluted Jane Fonda propaganda, and would rather see the end of human civilization than countenance building up a large fleet of nuclear reactors.
Mikey is “skeptical” about nuclear energy. When he mentions it he claims there is room for a diversity of opinions on the subject. Reading some of his other stuff it looks like he wants complete devolution of energy production away from big business to local level – but for some reason small modular nuclear reactors doesn’t fit his vision of self sufficient communities.
Nuclear energy has this thing called “radiation” which may be a bigger bug-a-boo to environmentalists than CO2.
Why isn’t there a big discussion about … hydrinos?
Why doesn’t the rest of the world go green and the US stay on fossil fuels? We could then charge the world for helping to fertilize their crops.
How about using the stuff that works and discarding the stuff that doesn’t
But all the stuff that don’t work would have their feelings hurt! 😮
Unfortunately, I had my car radio on while driving to the site of my afternoon run today. I turned it on in the middle of this interview and didn’t know who the interviewee was though it was obvious it was the voice of a propagandizer and proselytizer of the CAGW religion.
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was Hansen or Gavin or another of the usual nutters.
Eventually the transgressor was identified as none other than the infamous Michael “Piltdown” Mann.
WBUR is, of course, located in Boston. One of WBUR’s largest funders is Jeremy Grantham. You may rest assured that the station’s attitude and programming in respect of CAGW is bought and paid for.