Apparently, Brown learned nothing from the 100% renewable failures of Apple and Google. Both companies said they tried but can’t run on 100% renewable energy. California, known as the “Golden State” will likely become less and less desirable to live in and do business in as electricity prices soar, and grid reliability dwindles. Already, there’s a whole generation of people planning an exodus. I’ll probably be one of them – Anthony
By Valerie Richardson
Citing the “existential threat of climate change,” Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Monday making California the first state to set a goal of 100 percent renewable energy by 2045, despite concerns about increased electricity costs.
“California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change,” Mr. Brown said in his signing message. “This bill, and others I will sign this week, help us go in that direction. But have no illusions, California and the rest of the world have miles to go before we achieve zero-carbon emissions.”
The governor, who was joined at a press conference by Democratic mega-donor Tom Steyer, said the measure was needed in order for California to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which the United States exited earlier this year at President Trump’s direction.
“This bill and the executive order put California on a path to meet the goals of Paris and beyond. It will not be easy. It will not be immediate. But it must be done,” said Mr. Brown, a Democrat who leaves office after the November election.
The legislation, Senate Bill 100, speeds up the state’s renewable-energy benchmarks, setting goals of 50 percent electrical-power generation from energy sources such as wind and solar by 2025, and 60 percent by 2030.
The path to 100 percent renewables by 2045 was described as “the most ambitious carbon neutrality commitment of any major economic jurisdiction in the world — of more than 20 countries and at least 40 cities, states and provinces planning to go carbon neutral by mid-century or sooner.”
.@TomSteyer at #SB100 bill signing: This bill is about California’s global leadership…and environmental justice pic.twitter.com/oGFVZJthB0
— Will Simons (@WillSimons_94) September 10, 2018
Mr. Brown signed the measure over the objections of the state’s utility and agricultural sectors, including the Agricultural Council of California, Pacific Gas and Electric, San Diego Gas and Electric, and the Western States Petroleum Association.
Critics have argued that the bill is unrealistic and will compound the state’s problems with rolling brownouts and high energy prices. Natural-gas plants are used to make up for gaps when the sun fails to shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
At the same time, California has grappled with an oversupply of renewable energy, especially at noon when the sun is at its highest, leading the state to offload solar energy to other states.
“We pass all these goals for renewables, but at the same time our families back home will pay the cost with an increase in the electric bills every year as we try to achieve this,” Assemblyman Devon Mathis, a Republican, told the Sacramento Bee.
Meanwhile, environmentalists cheered the bill, with Environment America calling it “the crowning achievement of Governor Brown’s legacy of embracing clean energy and fighting climate change.”
“In California, Democrats and Republicans know climate change is real, it’s affecting our lives right now, and unless we take action immediately — it may become irreversible,” said Democratic state Sen. Kevin de León, the bill’s sponsor, who’s challenging Sen. Dianne Feinstein in November.
“Today, with Governor Brown’s support, California sent a message to the rest of the world that we are taking the future into our own hands — refusing to be the victims of its uncertainty,” he said in a statement.
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If renewables were truly less expensive, then those evil capitalists would exploit the cost savings to generate more profits – but that aint happening
Nuclear is way cheaper. So is coal, but there is a MASSIVE investment in Oil and Gas infrastructure. To throw that away and embrace nuclear is to destroy the value of some serious investment.
That is why we have renewables instead. The fundamental value of renewable energy is that its dos not actually work without exactly the same fossil fuel burn to make it and to balance it.
In short it meets the political need of virtue signalling about non existent anthropic climate change, makes money from rent seeking and does not actually replace a single gram of fossil fuel.
Who could ask for anything more?
What the state should do with it’s mid day “Oversupply” is to invest in Hydro Pumped Storage and put the oversupply into pumping water for night time energy production. The state will need approx. 4 times the current supply available in “Renewables” to replace the transportation sector and recharge night time batteries during daytime hours when most businesses are operating.
After all, the oversupply is Free Energy right??
And the Bullet Train to nowhere will require vast amounts of constantly available electricity to demonstrate it’s lack of efficiency.
This is CA we’re talking about. Build new pumped storage? Excuse me, I’m about to faint from lack of oxygen caused by an uncontrollable fit of laughter…
Pumped Storage requires a place to store the water, commonly called a Dam. The envirowhacos will NEVER approve another dam in CA, even for water to drink.
They will just demand agriculture use less water so cities can have more…thinking those selfish farmers are just wasting the water.
SR
How dare those greedy farmers waste all that water spraying it on crops when it could be used to water lawns instead.
But the exodus will mean less need for food!
See that’s the whole problem – the farmers are using water on their crops instead of “Brawndo”. The California “Idiocracy” freaks should know this from their “educaten”. I guess Gov Brown needs a refresher course.
It has electrolytes!
In places like CA, pumped storage would require 2 dams. A lower one and an upper one, since there aren’t many natural lakes or rivers with enough capacity to supply the water that you need to pump uphill in the first place.
In California it could be done without a dam. Look at the system on Racoon Mountain in Tennessee. There is a sustainable system where water is sucked up from the river, deposited in a lake and dispatched in the morning for prime time with a generator that has enough juice to suck the water back to the lake for the evening prime time. Rinse and repeat.
Can’t “take the water from the river” in CA.
It’s already over-allocated for other users, other processes – including washing the trash fish that moved into saltwater bays and marshland estuaries. Farmers are already being cut, people too, in favor of the delta smelt.
Can’t build a dam in the primary river the trap the discharged water from the power plant, to provide a suction and a storage location to pump it uphill to the non-existent, impossible to provide third reservoir above the first and second reservoir. Enviro’s already DEMAND we destroy the dams already built! They will NOT permit three new reservoirs for each pumped storage facility to be dug out, dammed up, and filled up with water they don’t have now.
Two dams, actually. In mountainous and desert areas like CA, you have to store all the water that was released from the first lake in the downstream lake to be able to pump it back over the dam to generate power the next day.
At Niagara, the near-inexhaustible Lake Eire waters flow naturally down towards the two massive storage lakes – but that local geology doesn’t occur anywhere but above the Niagara Falls escarpment. Even back in the 60’s, the enviro’s and Indians fought the dam that formed those reservoirs!
Pumped hydro was viable and in use long before renewables became a ‘thing’. link The problem is that it is very reliant on correct geography.
The problems with a more general application of pumped hydro are beyond daunting. link It ain’t gonna happen.
The EU experience should tell California where we are headed (I live here in Disneyland)
The paper referenced below is a detailed sophisticated report explains why wind power is economically “troublesome”.
Cali power costs are bad enough now. My average cost in 2017 was $0.25kwh. My MN summer retreat July 2018 power cost was $0.06kwh. Neither State has any meaningful coal, natural gas. or hydro power, but MN isn’t shutting down it’s nuclear…yet. The Sacremento liberal virtue signaling is getting expensive.
Nota DI Lavoro, 39.2014, Why wind is not coal (35 pages)
…variability can reduce the value of wind power by 20-50%…when wind penetration reaches 30%-40% integration costs…25-40 Eu/MWh at an average electricity price of approximately 70 Eu/MWh….
If jacobson’s study of 100% renewables at lower costs was even remotely credible, his brilliant expertise would warrant a 7 figure salary from most every utility company – or at least garner numerous consulting gigs at a $500k a pop.
But that ain’t happening
UNFCCC
Articles
Search results: smart grids.
https://unfccc.int/gcse?q=smart%20grids
UNFCCC search results: smart meters
https://unfccc.int/gcse?q=smart%20meters
UNFCCC search results: energy storage
https://unfccc.int/gcse?q=energy%20storage
UN / UNFCCC agenda enacted in California?
UNFCCC
External Statement / 02 NOV, 2017
Re: Deployment of smart grids.
https://unfccc.int/news/shift-to-clean-affordable-energy-critical-to-attaining-global-goals
Oh yeah smartgrids yeah we are all lining up to put them in. Like all stupid ill conceived ideas those pushing it can’t see how it could all go wrong 🙂
Barbara – if jacobson and the others advocating “renewable energy actually had real life expertise, then they would be commanding mega salaries to exploit the cost savings and profits the utility companies would generate.
That aint happening – which should be a clue that:
A)those guys lack any expertise and
B ) It aint feasable – at least not on the scale they are advocating.
All of these ideas are untested. If we are to assume that they would work without any actual proof…
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=magnet+motor
This sort of aggressive stupidity is why I left Calizuela.
no water, no food, no jobs, no electricity..no tax money for their socialist agenda
…I love the way these things are self correcting
The Democrats in congress will pass a bill sending CA money from the parts of the country that still work.
Probably. And the Republicans will nothing to stop them.
Sadly, also probably.
Sheri, you are assuming Republicans still have a majority after the midterms. They might have a majority still in the Senate or a large enough minority there to stop dumb Democrat initiatives but if Republicans lose the House the country will be back to Obama policies.
I’ve said before, the last election was a stay of execution – hopefully this country will not be stupid enough to waste it.
There may be an October Surprise… Declassify Mr President, Declassify!
I assume no such thing. I truly fear the arrogance of Republicans thinking they are now the “winners” and the constant work of Obama and his OFA bringing in the vote will lose them both the house and senate. Republicans live with their heads in the sand.
Could this action by the CA gov initiate the re-writing of federal disaster relief funding rules? — because this sure seems to me to be a disaster in the making.
MarkW said: “The Democrats in congress will pass a bill sending CA money from the parts of the country that still work.”
Sure Mark, that explains why California ranks 43rd in federal aid as a percentage of state general funding. They receive 26% of state general funding from the federal government. Sheri’s Wyoming ranks 12th in the country, at 35.5%. The top 10 “taker” states are mostly red states, with the exception of Oregon. Maine, which is purple, and Montana, which is somewhat purple, are also in the top 10. So 7 out of 10 takers are solid red states, 2 are purple, and 1 blue.
https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/
“no water, no food, no jobs, no electricity..no tax money for their socialist agenda” . . . and they will not put a dent in CO2 emissions. They will keep importing China’s carbon footprint and electricity generated from fossil fuel from other states. They will put a dent in the special interests pocket books.
The Left moves to destroy another state. Virus!
Too bad we cannot send all the crazy Socialists in Calif to South America paradises.
I’m sure Oregon’s next – especially after all the climate-refugees from California move up, learning nothing, and bringing their votes.
Oregon is already going down that dead-end path:
“Oregon lawmakers have approved legislation to eliminate coal from the state’s electrical supply by 2035, the first U.S. state to do so.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oregon-coal-free_us_56da088ce4b0ffe6f8e98a7c
They think its OK to buy coal powered electricity from other states, though.
SR
‘They think its OK to buy coal powered electricity from other states, though.’
That’s the pretentious, hypocritical posturing part of it – which is really what Oregon lawmakers specialize in – my God, have you ever listened to Jeff Merkley? I can’t even discuss Kate Brown.
Seems to be a core feature of this mentality. Posture , preen and virtue signal and claim to be leading the charge and then in reality lean on others for the resources you claim not to use.
Ca > closes nuclear and fossil fuel power production – imports same from other States
Germany > closes nuclear and beats its breast about Energiewende – wouldnt survive without nuclear power from France and brown coal power
Denmark > Wind poster child – wouldnt survive without neighbours, nuclear Sweden and Hydro Norway
South Australia > “Leading ” renewables State in Australia – wouldnt survive without an interconnector to coal fired power State, had to “oops!” spend half a billion dollars on fossil generators when they finally worked out that high wind% = instability
Scratch one layer down and it becomes pretty clear what really holds up energy supply.
Germany has gone down the same path, it is now dependent on Russian gas.
Unfortunately Washington State will be right along side Oregon in adopting this nonsense. I plan to ride the West Coast salary as long as I can stand it before moving back East where prices and people are a bit more reasonable.
Something is always lost in translation.
https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/status?end=20180910T00
Oh do look at California’s power generation and Oregon’s.
Oregon can close the coal fired power plants and still have ample output.
So where is Oregon’s surplus power generation going?
Look at the numbers for CISO interchange – what a big beautiful number
I picked a day ago for the date, there is a time lag on the reporting of data. It is a fun site to play with
enjoy
michael
interesting – California imports appox 1/3 of their electric generation – Governor Brown out will increase it to 3/4s of electricy imported from out of state with this 100 percent renewable mandate
Joel
and others just click on the date in the upper right corner of the display
Which display? What are we looking for?
Sorry the link, it is for power general nation wide by region.
Don’t see the point you can choose any date you like
I notice that my very first employer, the city-owned Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, was not among those objecting….
You answered the question you asked… “city-owned.” The reality is when the city is involved, it means public unions owning the politicians in California.
Unions and government bureaucracies working together create catastrophes of mismanagement. The most poorly run job I ever had was working for a unionized city-county combined bus system in Oregon.
The most commonly heard comment from riders was “why isn’t riding free of charge?”
OSU students voiced this query the most!
SR
Well of course they did…OSU students are always looking to government for a Free Ride
Hmm… an existential threat… must take action immediately…
It sounds like he meant to sign a bill for 100% nuclear power, instead of 100% renewables.
I say let them try, better them than me.
Indeed, they want to put themselves on the path to self-destruction, let them – so long as the rest of the country isn’t on the hook to bail them out of their self-inflicted mess. And to the few sane people in California (all 42 of you) it’s time to move to a better state.
The rest of the country will be littered with their “renewables” because they won’t pollute their beaches or tourist areas.
“Today, with Governor Brown’s support, California sent a message to the rest of the world that we are taking the future into our own hands — refusing to be the victims of its uncertainty,” he said in a statement. Well, someone should advise these nuts that the future will be whatever it will be, and anything California does won’t make the slightest difference. Why do Califorians believe that they are the controllers of Earth’s destiny? The actual message being sent is that a bunch of boneheaded politicians are looking to make hay from events they cannot possibly control. Ah, the
irony is almost as thick as these morons’ skulls. Don’t you just love the fact that these ignorant souls do not want the most effective no carbon power – nuclear. So they’ve elected the low carbon technologies that belong in the 16th century.
Truly the land of fruits and nuts…
I have to thank the people of California for volunteering to show the rest of us the consequences of too much renewable energy.
Applications for refugee status will be accepted at the second window every second Tuesday from noon to 1pm. Unless the staff is at lunch.
Problem is that it will hasten the exodus of Liberals into idolic conservative towns and cities who will push their Liberal agenda and ideology on the area turning it into a waste hole.
Buy insulation, buy ammo.
It will take time for this disaster to unfold. (Perhaps I should have said “continue to unfold”?)
The unblinded will have left before then.
(Personally, I wouldn’t mind having Anthony or others like him as a neighbor.)
Lunch – 1145-1300, I guess.
Auto
Maybe they should be made to go to their own DMV to apply? I hear thats a special experience.
See you on the road sometime, Anthony, escape planning in work even before this latest Brown-doggle.
Made my escape 27 years ago! Moved to Montana.
Prepare for the “Brown”outs
California’s idea of renewable is to use electricity generated out of state (and not ask how it was generated).
The enviro-nuts work aggressively to block the construction of new grid interconnector transmission lines needed to keep Cal’s lights on when the wind stops blowing, and it’s a hot summer night in the East valley of LA.
See my post above about Oregon banning coal powered electricity generation within their state, but OK with buying said power from other states.
SR
I think other states should abide by Oregon’s wishes for “clean” energy and not allow them access to any of their “dirty” energy. Same with Cali, other state should refuse them access to their “dirty energy” and let Cali and Oregon see what 100% renewable really means.
That idea has its appeal, but would inflict unnecessary financial hardship upon the common-folk. Neighboring states maintaining coal powered plants just east of California’s and Oregon’s borders may be just as effective at displaying the hypocrisy.
The boost to CO2 levels with resultant greening would make a win-win situation.
SR
Unfortunately the “common-folk” need to see a bit of “financial hardship” in order to learn what it is they voted for. If you coddle them, they’re never going to learn their lessons, and will continue to vote for crazy. Perhaps with a bit of “financial hardship” they’ll vote for some adults to undo the crazy policies that lead them to that “financial hardship”.
And then there’s New York. They get their energy via Niagara Falls. Hydro.
Easy for that bastion of enviro logic’s politicians to demand the rest of the country continue “The war on coal” (and all other fossil fuels) by going solar or wind or … well … anything else that doesn’t actually work. As long as it’s not that evil nuclear!
Unfortunately many of the people fleeing California will vote for politicians in their new state who will enact the same policies that drove them out of California in the first place.
Like the African immigrants infesting Europe?
Shouldn’t they be called “rolling Brown-outs”?
Adding less reliable electricity generation is supposed to reduce the rolling black/Gov brown outs?
If it’s Brown, flush it down.
Unless you are in Cali, in which case you vote it into office and then wonder why things keep getting worse.
I laugh almost daily at the thought of Californians frying. Why? Because the fools believe the lie about the wind always blowing in Wyoming and think tying into Wyoming renewables will keep their lights on. Thus far this summer, I estimate that 90% of the hottest days had no wind or too little wind to turn turbines. So, believing the lie means sitting in the heat without air conditioning or lights. I don’t care anymore. They crapped on our state (with the agreement of our progressive, oil hating money-loving “leaders”) and if it fries them and leaves them living without modern conveniences, well, bad things happen when you deny reality. Trying to educate the cult concerning the lies is a complete waste of time.
Wyoming needs to slap a generation tax on those turbines to keep them from destroying the landscape and views.
Wyoming already has a relatively modest tax on wind generation of $1 per MWh. There has been discussion in the state legislature of raising the tax but they have not done so yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Wyoming
Yes, it’s very “modest” and actual numbers on revenue are hard to find because they reportedly show how horribly inefficient the wind power is and how little money is actually collected. There is ONE legislator trying to raise the tax (the one other guy who was in is retiring, I think). The fools in Wyoming will sell their mothers for a $1.00 if they think they can get re-elected, so if wind promises a dime on a dollar, they sign right up. You can’t then tax the guys who gave you the dime, you know. The one guy trying to increase the taxes is an economist, surprise, surprise. He sends emails, has some supporters and gives it his best, but Wyomingites are dumb as a box of rocks where money and wind lies are concerned. (The Republican candidate for governor is tied to the greens very tightly. Not a chance of getting an increase now.)
I’ve driven past the enormous wind warm between Laramie and Rawlins WY numerous times when not a single turbine was turning. Of course, when they are spinning it’s a death zone for all manner of flying creatures.
Once the science is corrected, all of this nonsense will disappear. Anyone with half a brain must recognize that 1 W/m^2 of forcing simply can not result in the 4.3 W/m^2 increase in surface emissions necessarily arising from the claimed 0.8C temperature increase. The misinformed ‘consensus’ asserts that feedback amplifies 1 W/m^2 into the 4.3 W/m^2 of incremental surface emissions required to support the claimed temperature increase. Not withstanding the fact that Bode’s LINEAR feedback amplifier analysis has been horribly misapplied, anyone familiar with Conservation of Energy will recognize this immediately as the signature of perpetual motion, that is, energy just appears out of nowhere. Indeed, if all 239 W/m^2 of accumulated solar forcing also resulted in 4.3 W/m^2 of surface emissions as the next W/m^2 from the Sun is claimed to do, the surface temperature would be close to the boiling point of water. How the next W/m^2 of forcing increases emissions by 4.3 W/m^2, while each of the previous ones only contribute 1.6 W/m^2 to the surface emissions has never been and simply can not be explained without magic. I don’t accept magic as driving the climate system and only believe in the testable laws of physics.
Politics has no place in science and California has pushed the science so far out of the way it’s should be criminal. The state has no power over the laws of physics, yet the policy, regulations and legislation coming from Sacramento attempt to legislate the laws of physics by asserting climate change from CO2 emissions will be catastrophic and is the reason for all of the stupidity.
Isn’t this the core of Christopher Monckton’s argument? (stated in a slightly different way, but boiling down to the same point)
From what he reports, the Official Climate Scientists (TM) are panicking about it… not that they will ever let little things like facts get in the way of their global socialist agenda.
It’s pretty much the core of all skeptical arguments, stated in the context of energy. That is, the stated ECS is too high by at least a factor of 3 and the reason it’s so hard to get right is that the IPCC got in the way of scientific progress by crafting a self serving consensus surrounding the conflicted reports it generates. The core scientific/modeling error, which is also at the core of CM’s argument, is that the misappropriated feedback analysis provided the wiggle room to claim what the laws of physics precludes.
There’s definitely a panic among the CAGW ‘scientists’ as evidenced by how they’re doubling down on the broken science as the CAGW driven politicians are doubling down on their broken agendas. If there are any competent scientists on the side of CAGW, they must surely realize that they can’t be right and this will also drive panic owing to the devastating consequences to the political left once the scientific truth is realized.
No. Lord Monckton’s theory, at least as propounded last June at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcxcZ8LEm2A, is nothing more than bad extrapolation.
Suppose you want to extrapolate y’s value at x = 251 from its values 271 and 275 at x values of 249 and 250. Since y changed by 275 – 271 = 4 for that x change of 250 – 249 = 1, you’d probably estimate a change of another 4, from 275 to 279, for that further change of 1 in x from 250 to 251. That’s standard extrapolation.
If the function is the equilibrium temperature that results from feedback and the argument is temperature without feedback, though, Lord Monckton says thus using standard extrapolation would be a “startling error of physics.” In what the (earlier) video of the Heartland Institute’s Twelfth International Conference on Climate Change billed as his “mathematical proof,” he says that the extrapolation would in any area of science other than climatology be based instead on the ratio of the variables’ entire quantities, not of their differences, or, as the IPCC has it in its feedback definition, of “perturbations.”
That’s just not true. The analogous extrapolation in electrical circuits, too, would be based on perturbations rather than entire quantities. His “test rig” is unlikely to show anything other than that in a strictly linear system his approach is as good as the perturbation approach purportedly used by climatology. It would be trivial to design a circuit to show that in a nonlinear system his approach would be worse than climatology’s.) Lord Monckton just doesn’t know math. (Or electrical circuits.)
There are plenty of good reasons to think any warming will be modest (and, in my view, beneficial). But Lord Monckton’s isn’t among them. (Nor, as it happens, is co2isnotevil’s.)
jhborn,
You’re making assumptions about by position that aren’t true. My position is that the effect of incremental CO2 is finite, but far smaller than claimed by the IPCC and what little warming results, along with the increased CO2, will be far more beneficial than harmful. I believe this to be CM’s position as well.
To be clear, I categorically reject the entire range of ECS presumed by the IPCC as being unrealizable by any Earth-like climate system that conforms to first principles physics which concisely and unambiguously limits the maximum possible ECS to be less than the IPCC’s lower limit.
CM’s analysis focused on a temperature input to produce a temperature output, which is still a non linear relationship but far more linear than the relationship between forcing and temperature. He chose that route because the ‘consensus’ thinks in terms of temperatures and not in terms of conserving energy.
I prefer expressing the system in terms of energy, as it’s Joules that must be conserved and the only significant source of Joules entering the system is the Sun. Focusing on temperature is the problem because while the relationship between total solar forcing and surface emissions is demonstrably linear, the relationship between total forcing and temperature is dictated by the SB Law which is very non linear even as the relationship between stored energy and temperature is linear.
BTW, a non linear system simply can’t be modeled using Bode’s LINEAR feedback amplifier analysis which assumes strict linearity (per the first 2 paragraphs in Bode’s book). Attempting to apply Bode’s analysis to a non linear system is pointless. When an amplifier goes non linear and starts to clip, Bode’s analysis no longer applies because the gain becomes dependent on the input forcing and constant gain is a necessary property of a linear system that can be mapped to Bode’s LINEAR feedback model.
The other fatal flaw with the climate feedback model is that the implicit power supply Bode assumes is not present in the climate system whose requirement is also outlined in the first 2 paragraphs of his book. This is how they arm wave 3.3 W/m^2 of new surface input to offset emissions above and beyond the W/m^2 of forcing said to result from the presumed nominal 0.8C increase. This massive power boost originates from the implicit power supply which while part of the model is not part of the actual system being modeled.
I’ve already explained to you why you’re all wet on the theory, and I gave you specific numbers to show that there’s no reason in principle why feedback couldn’t exceed forcing without violating energy conservation. Had you bothered to do the arithmetic, you’d have seen the error. Since you won’t bestir yourself to learn, I see no reason to expend any further effort on enlightening you.
For any lurkers, you’ll find a nice debunking of co2isnotevil’s theories by commenter Jeff Patterson in the thread here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/07/how-climate-feedback-is-fubar/.
What Steve McIntyre said in connection with Lord Monckton also applies to co2isnotevil: “I discourage people from thinking in over-simplistic terms.”
jhborn,
No you haven’t demonstrated how feedback can exceed the forcing for a STABLE system with unit open loop power gain. All you have cited is hypothetical cases that have no correspondence to the climate system or to how it’s modeled. Context is important here.
More to the point, you haven’t explained how you can assume positive feedback in excess of 3 times the forcing can arise from the next W/m^2 of forcing, while all previous W/m^2 of forcing only resulted in 600 mw/m^2 of surface input in excess of the forcing (i.e. NET feedback).
There’s no known law of physics that can support the next Joule of input energy being 5.5 (3.3/.6) times more powerful at warming the surface than any other Joule entering the system, all of which are arriving to the system at the same time. Joules are Joules, the units of work are Joules and and it takes work to heat the surface. Nothing about thermodynamics is more fundamental than this.
BTW, the only thing ‘simple’ about my approach to modeling is that it’s just simple enough to be testable. The beauty of a simple model based on the laws of physics is that there’s no wiggle room to get results that fail to match reality and if tests of the model reveal the same results it predicts, the burden of validation changes from one of proof to one of falsification.
jhborn,
FYI, here’s how they get to 3.3 W/m^2. They consider the gain to be 1.63
(390 W/m^2 @ur momisugly 288K surface / 239 W/m^2 @ur momisugly255K planet) which is miscast as feedback.
What they do is amplify 1 W/m^2 of forcing by 1.63, consider half to be returned to the surface, amplified by 1.63 and so on and so forth.
1.63 + 1.63/2 + 1.63/4 + … = 3.26 which they round up to 3.3 and when added to the W/m^2 of forcing said to cause it is the 4.3 W/m^2 of incremental emissions corresponding to an 0.8C increase in the surface temperature. The mistake they made should be obvious.
The mistake goes back to the original Hansen paper, where feedback and gain were interchanged. In this case, the starting 1.63 is considered the feedback, which starts out 1.63 times the input power, implying a closed look gain of 1.63 and 100% positive feedback or a higher open loop gain and less positive feedback. Schlesinger’s paper really didn’t fix this as he claimed to do, but only changed the labels on the equation and added layers of obfuscation.
Since the 610 mw per W/m^2 of surface emissions in excess of the forcing can only be replenished by power feed back from the atmosphere, it might suggest that the equation to calculate to total feedback power from 1 W/m^2 of forcing is,
.61 + .61/2 + .6/4 + … = 1.22
which when added to 1 W/m^2 is 2.22 W/m^2, corresponding to about a 0.4C temperature increase and just at the low end of the IPCC estimate.
However; the proper equation to calculate the feedback power from 1 W/m^2 of forcing based on the proper amount of feedback would be:
f + f/2 + f/4 + … = 0.61
in which case, f = .305 (30.5% positive feedback) and when 0.61 is added to the 1 W/m^2 of forcing, the 1.61 W/m^2 increase in emissions results in about a 0.28C increase in temperature and well below the IPCC’s lower limit of 0.4C.
This co2isnotevil guy is never very clear, but to the extent that he thinks it would violate energy conservation for back radiation to exceed direct radiation, simple arithmetic reveals that he’s wrong.
To show this simply we consider a hypothetical. Because of convection and conduction, an altitude layer in the real atmosphere can emit more or less radiation than it absorbs. To keep things simple, though, let’s imagine that there’s no convection or conduction: at equilibrium each layer has to emit all it absorbs. Also, the real atmosphere absorbs some solar radiation directly, but in our hypothetical the atmosphere is completely transparent to solar radiation; it absorbs radiation only from the surface and other layers.
The following quantities are consistent with those assumptions but show that the surface emits 2.2 W/m^2 for every 1 W/m^2 it absorbs from the sun. Yet only that 1 W/m^2 escapes back to space.
So the question is, Where has energy been created or destroyed?
Total Absorbed from: Surface L.Atm U.Atm Space Absorbed Absorbed by: Surface 0.0000 1.0500 0.1500 1.0000 || 2.2000 Lower Atmosphere 1.6500 0.0000 0.4500 0.0000 || 2.1000 Upper Atmosphere 0.4125 0.7875 0.0000 0.0000 || 1.2000 Space 0.1375 0.2625 0.6000 0.0000 || 1.0000 ------------------------------------------------ Total Emitted: 2.2000 2.1000 1.2000 1.0000jhborn,
Your example returns a larger fraction of the absorbed energy back to the surface than is emitted into space. The geometry of our SEMI TRANSPARENT atmosphere limits the average fraction returned to the surface to about 1/2 of what the atmosphere absorbs and the data confirms this in no uncertain terms. Hypothetical cases have no relevance when the example is inconsistent with the physical limitations constraining system.
Our atmosphere absorbs nearly 77% of all NET surface emissions, mostly by clouds, which for surface emissions of 390 W/m^2 @ur momisugly 288K, leaves only 90 W/m ^2 to leave the planet. The remaining 150 W/m^2 required to offset the 240 W/m^2 of incident solar energy must be coming from the atmosphere, most of which comes from cloud tops.
All we need to do now is apply COE. The atmosphere is absorbing about 300 W/m^2 of the surface emissions and 150 W/m^2 of this must be emitted into space, leaving 150 W/m^2 to be returned to the surface. Add the 150 W/m^2 returned to the surface with the 240 W/m^2 arriving from the Sun, and there’s exactly enough to offset the surface emissions. The 50/50 split is confirmed, at least in the case when the atmosphere absorbs 77% of the energy emitted by the surface.
Ironically, if you believe Trenberth and that the atmosphere absorbs closer to 90% of what the surface emits, the required fraction emitted into space in order to offset the incident energy becomes greater than 50%, leaving less than half available to be returned to the surface. The 50/50 split is basically an geometric attractor that directs chaotic variability around a mean defined by the geometrically required 50/50 split.
You might cite non radiant energy like latent heat and thermals as a ‘complication’ that changes the 50/50 split. Trenberth screwed the pooch here by conflating non radiant energy with radiant energy relative to the radiant balance. If you examine his balance diagram closely and subtract the return of latent heat and thermals from the ‘back radiation’ term, all that’s left are the W/m^2 of surface input offsetting its BB emissions. In effect, latent heat and thermals have a zero sum influence on the NET surface emissions and the subsequent energy balance.
To support this perceived complication, the question that needs an answer is what effect does latent heat, thermals plus the return of this energy to the surface have on the average temperature, its BB emissions and the radiant balance other than the effect they’re already having on the average temperature, its BB emissions and the radiant balance?
You might also bring up solar absorption by clouds as another complication. Again, look carefully at what’s happening. The hydro cycle connects the water in the clouds to the water on the surface over very short periods of time and nearly all of the solar energy absorbed by the atmosphere is absorbed by the water in clouds. When considering averages over periods of time longer than the nominal period of the hydro cycle, any solar energy absorbed by the water clouds becomes a proxy for solar energy absorbed by surface waters, which is equivalent to solar energy absorbed by the surface.
Back to the feedback exceeding the forcing case. There’s no powered gain in the atmosphere, so in principle, the concept of feedback is moot and all we really have is a passive network with feed forward, where some fraction of current surface emissions are delayed by the atmosphere to be added with future solar input to offset future surface emissions. Certainly, in this case, stability is guaranteed under all conditions as Bode shows how passive systems are unconditionally stable and the climate system is unambiguously a passive system based on Bode’s definition of one as having no internal sources of power (the Sun is not an internal source of power).
What’s probably confusing you, is that in the classic feedback amplifier, the gain equation is 1/Go = 1/g + f, where Go is the open loop gain, g is the closed loop gain and f is the fraction of the output returned to the input. Go and g are dimensionless ratios and f is a fraction between 0 and 1. When Go is 1 and f is 1, g is infinite which represents instability at 100% positive feedback and not 50%. However; for the Earth’s climate system, the closed loop gain of the surface relative to solar forcing, g, is currently 1.6 and can never exceed 2 as long as the surface is in DIRECT equilibrium with the Sun through a dynamically adaptable semi-transparent atmosphere, thus the maximum possible average feed forward power is limited to half of the surface emissions which is also the magnitude of the input forcing.
Will the climate system oscillate or will the gain become infinite if the feed forward power exceeds the forcing? No, because the climate can not be modeled as an active amplifier and active amplification is required to enable this kind of instability. To be absolutely clear, active and dynamic do not mean the same thing and the atmosphere is certainly dynamic as it adjusts to conditions, but is definitely not active, per Bode, as it contains no internal sources of energy.
The concept of instability is not limited to an infinite or oscillating state, but includes states that are not possible steady state solutions, in which case, the state will adjust itself to what can be sustained by the system. For passive systems like the climate, an unsustainable state is the only possible type of instability that can ever occur.
Consider a series RC circuit. If 10V is instantly applied, the voltage across the R starts at 10V and across the C starts as 0V. Is this a sustainable state? No. The stable state arises once the capacitor has been charged up to 10V and the voltage across the R drops to 0V.
If the feed forward power, which is mis-characterized as feedback power, transiently exceeds the forcing to the climate system, the system will necessarily re-adjust by increasing or decreasing the surface temperature or cloud coverage until this is no longer the case. Once again, this is a constraint imposed by the geometry of the Earth’s passive climate system.
This doesn’t apply if the surface whose temperature we care about isn’t the surface in DIRECT equilibrium with the Sun. For example, on Venus, the usual GHG effect operates between cloud tops and space and the cloud tops comprise the surface in direct equilibrium with the Sun through a semi-transparent atmosphere between those cloud tops and space. Once the temperature of the cloud tops is established, the temperature of the solid surface below is dictated by the PVT profile of a compressed gas for similar reasons that the temperature at the bottom of Earth’s oceans is dictated by the temperature/density profile of water.
Please note that when I refer to instability when feedback exceeds the forcing, I always try to qualify it as applied to our actual climate system with a semi transparent atmosphere which limits the average feed forward power to half of what the atmosphere absorbs.
Ever notice how many wind turbines arent spinning and generating electricity?
Ever wonder why those wind turbines are repaired and put back on line – as fast as possible?
Maybe – because the repair costs are greater than the value of the electricity generated.
joe – the non climate scientist
Rather, since some 14,000 older wind turbines in California alone have been abandoned in-place since 1970 (left to rust on their towers and concrete as a blight on the landscape), I would ask:
“Ever wonder why those wind turbines are not repaired and put back on line – as fast as possible?
Maybe – because the (unsubsidized) repair costs are far, far greater than the value of the little bit of (heavily subsidized) electricity generated.
14,000, huh? Evidence to support that claim?
Here’s someone that has been visiting the original CA wind farm sites and tracking wind turbines since 1980. He says it’s likely less than 100, at the most a few hundred. So you are only off by a factor of 50-100.
http://www.wind-works.org/cms/index.php?id=85&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=2804&cHash=ceac96f5cb7597fd41366e9b4ceeca04
I saw the writing on the wall for California 30 years ago, and left almost 2 decades ago. I now live in a state that makes both food and energy. I’m looking forward to becoming wealthy selling those to the unfortunate who decided to stay.
California produces the greatest value of agricultural products in the US. It’s not even close. http://beef2live.com/story-states-produce-food-value-0-107252
But they won’t continue to do so if they don’t upgrade their water infrastructure and continue to divert water to save bait fish.
So your plan to get rich is to wait until CA’s agricultural industry goes down (assuming they don’t invest in water infrastructure for the next few decades) so you can sell them food, and also sell them renewable power. Is that it?
Sounds like you should be working on a plan B.
I don’t consider it a “plan” so much as an inevitability. I’ll be fine either way.
But considering that CA seems more interested in spending 12-figures on a “train to nowhere” instead of focusing on improving the water infrastructure they stopped building 40 years ago with a population of 20-million that now has to support over 40-million, I’m pretty confident that my prediction will be spot-on. Farmers without water flowing or affordable electricity to pump it from ever shrinking aquifers won’t be growing all that much food. Californians will be needing both, and it looks like what they’ll be generating or growing within their own state will not be enough.
It’s not an inevitability. First off, if you know your history, it was CA voters that rejected a levy that would have funded improvements to the state water system. There is a major upgrade that was more than 10 years in the planning stages, that is likely to move forward. http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/commentary/sd-oe-california-waterfix-tunnels-20180427-story.html#
In 2011 or thereabouts some twat on the internet remarked that ‘by 2020 Britain would be 100% renewable energy’.
Even if that was solely electricity generation I was sceptical.
I was also retired with time on my hands, and my degree is in electrical sciences…
Some research on energy density revealed that (the late) Professor David Mackay had already covered that – And in fact I managed to help him get his crucial book – ‘without hot air*’ – published with and by an ex colleague of mine. I saw no need to repeat his massively excellent analysis of renewable energy.
David subsequently became a scientific advisor to the UK government and his common sense has done much to ensure that at least some nuclear power is in the mix.
However there was another couple of aspects to renewables that a practising engineer would think of, and one was the impact of intermittency, and the other was cost competitiveness.
I wrote a monograph on that in around 2011**, but the impact of intermittency was still unknown so in order to investigate that I started to download and build a database of ACTUAL energy generation – especially wind – in the UK. For test purposes I generated a retro style dashboard and to my surprise the thing acquired an instant and growing fan club***.
It also put me in contact with Euan Mearns , Roger Andrews and Hugh Sharman whose contributions to ‘Energy Matters’ **** were exactly what I had intended to do with the data, massive analysis that showed that intermittency wasn’t just a minor issue, it was as I has suspected a serious major and crippling problem .
Hugh Sharman who is/was working with Eirgrid on fast start combined cycle gas turbines co-authored a study to see how much gas was burnt coping with wind variability compared with generating using CCGT as more or less baseload. The answer was (for the oldish type of CCGT involved ) about 50% of the CO2 savings that wind allegedly offered were in fact lost in providing rapid unscheduled dispatch to cater for its variability.
I suspect that the same is true of solar power.
If – as in say Australia – you are using coal as the dispatch (which its perfectly capable of) the short answer is that adding wind to a coal grid adds nothing but complexity and expense. No carbon emissions savings are to be had at all.
Finally my analysis of renewables featured something no one else I suspect has even attempted. True and genuine levelised social cost of the technologies. That is not concocted numbers but genuine costs not only of the technology itself excluding subsidies, but externality costs, such as the impact on the grid, and dispatchable generation.
Most of this is in the monograph.
I did all this before I became interested in climate change: My aim was to see what the cost of non fossil generation would be. And whether all renewable was even possible.
The conclusions of 6 years plus of study is as follows.
(a) All renewable energy in the UK at least would be devastation in terms of both environmental impact, safety, and cost. And that is just electri8city supply. Not transport fuel
(b) if Carbon neutral electricity generation is needful, nuclear power provides a far better cost benefit in terms of cost per gram CO2 saved. Even with the current regulatory inflation. It has also the least environmental impact and the lowest death rate of any primary energy generation technology.
I think I said at the close of my monograph that
Nuclear power is not a solution, it is the ONLY solution.
California used to have intelligent people in it.
This is serious stuff. If we are talking about legacies to leave to the future, the most irresponsible one to leave would be an all renewable California. The most responsible one would be a state self sufficient in nuclear and hydro energy. With nary a windmill or solar panel in the whole state.
Globally, and especially in the West, Energy is the biggest marketplace of all. It is no surprise that green politics and fear and scare have been used to protect existing technologies and mandate new ones that do not compete with them. The misdirection that Big Oil and Gas are behind climate scepticism is laughable. Big Oil and Gas took over the Greens and used it to promote technologies that didn’t work – ‘renewable energy’/batteries etc’ – and absolutely to smash those that did – coal, fracking and nuclear.
The saddest sickest vision is to realise that all those ‘Liberals’ who genuinely believe they are going up against Global Capitalism and Big Oil are in fact their willing tools.
And they are not saving the planet, they are destroying civilisation, and returning it to a pre industrial society.
A sort of post modern serfdom.
* https://www.withouthotair.com/
** http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf
*** https://gridwatch.org.uk
**** http://euanmearns.com/
Hinckley Point (Sizewell) C is going ahead with France’s EDF and China General Nuclear Power Corp. And that in spite of the Windscale fire of 1957, a design similar to Chernobyl.
Meanwhile ITER Fusion Reactor contstruction goes ahead at Cadarache, near Aix-en-Provence. The UK and Germany are loosing rapidly any nuclear manufacturing capability….
The height of arrogance, hubris, and stupidity thinking you can legislate technology invention. Moonbeam truly believes he’s the messiah of Global Warming and will lead the state, nation, and world to deliverance. He either ignores or is unaware of California’s current dispatchable wind and solar energy and constantly refers to name plate outputs, ignores how the energy imported to the state is produced and doesn’t count it in his roll up, and is full steam ahead on shutting down existing nuclear power plants. These are the type of people leading us into energy poverty with virtue signaling ignorance.
It’s even more insane attempting to legislate the laws of physics as California is attempting to do by wrapping legislation with false scientific claims in a vain attempt to legislate those claims into existence. It’s really no different then declaring gravity is harmful and we must legislate it away.
The citizens of California should demand that the Federal government step in and save us and the future of our state from this lunatic governor that pushes legislation that contradicts the immutable laws of physics. It’s in the national interest to do so, as California contributes a large part of the countries GDP and by itself is more economically powerful than most countries. To loose that economic activity due to scientific ignorance would be a national disgrace and economic suicide.
“The citizens of California should demand that the Federal government step in and save us and the future of our state…”
Sorry, but the voters have spoken. The Feds have no place picking winners & losers at the state level. It’s no different than the Swamp Elites trying to undermine a duly elected president because they want to save the future of the country.
The voters have nothing to do with this. You can’t vote to change the laws of nature. They are what they are and that’s all there is to it. Man can discover new laws, but no proposed new law or any existing law of physics can support the insanely high ECS claimed by the IPCC, nor can one be legislated into existence.
It’s not a matter of picking winners and losers, but one of enabling truth to emerge from a fog of malevolent deception even though that truth is exceptionally harmful to the political left.
This is the “Science” behind this nonsense. They are literally wasting every penny they spend on these programs. Simply look at the real science supporting the GHG Effect, it doesn’t implicate CO2.
Quantum Physics 101; Why CO2 Can’t be Melting the Glaciers and Sea Ice
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/quantum-physics-101-why-co2-cant-be-melting-the-glaciers-and-sea-ice/
Why CO2 is Irrelevant to the Earth’s Lower Atmosphere; You Can’t Absorb More than 100%
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/why-co2-is-irrelevant-to-the-earths-lower-atmosphere-you-cant-absorb-more-than-100/
“You Can’t Absorb More than 100%”
Exactly. Nor can more be returned to the surface than is absorbed by the atmosphere and this is what they require to support the insanely high ECS. By subverting Bode, they were able to take advantage of his implicit power supply to provide the extra output power required to boost 1 W/m^2 of forcing into 4.3 W/m^2 of emissions and then attempt to wiggle out of this contradiction by claiming the implicit power supply and solar forcing are the same thing which only demonstrates ignorance about how amplifiers amplify.
Expressing the ECS as ‘incremental’ degrees per W/m^2 only hides the inconsistencies, after all, 0.8C per W/m^2 sounds a lot more plausible than 4.3 W/m^2 of incremental surface emissions per W/m^2 of forcing and doesn’t lead to the inconvenient question regarding what’s replenishing the 3.3 W/m^2 of emissions in excess of the forcing in order to prevent the surface from loosing energy and cooling?
Trouble is, your propositions are unintelligible to those in positions of power.
Simplistic messages and virtue signalling are much easier
Only to those in power who lean left and unfortunately, most with the power to correct climate science lean so far to the left they have trouble with the basic arithmetic skills required to understand my arguments (this shortcoming of progressive thought applies to their economic theories as well).
The problem is that the left latched on to the wrong side of the science and to admit they are wrong would be devastating to the Democrats, especially with an election coming. Consider that of all foolishness coming from the political left, they consider their stand on climate change to be their most supportable position and even many in the center and the right are bamboozled by their bombastic balderdash. When it’s finally accepted how incredibly wrong they are, and I mean wrong by such a wide margin it’s embarrassing, the damage to the Democratic party will be incalculable as people are inspired to apply objective due diligence to some of the other emotionally charged positions supported by the left.
There is always sunshine and wind in CA so there are no worries
Yeah. the midnight solar energy is massive caused by all the streetlamps…
Only in Spain – When corrupt solar operators did run diesels to run lights shining on solar panels to generate night time electricity that they then sold back to the grid. Yes, it was a net profit!
”There is always sunshine and wind in CA so there are no worries”
Yeah sure .. nice sarc.
If Gov. Brown truly does not want CA to be the victim of the uncertainty of the future he should embrace ‘resilience’, adaptation, and nuclear power, then Californians could face the future with some confidence.
Brown doesnt want to be a victim of uncertainty, so he legislates uncertainty. Genius.
No better way to engineer uncertainty of supply than to wind up intermittent power sources (dont call them renewables, because they arent)
Anyone who says carbon when they mean carbon dioxide is probably a liar. But I’m quite pleased because my ‘carbon’ footprint is zero. (CO2 – another matter)
I’ve often said that when you hear anyone say “carbon free” or “carbon pollution” you know you’re in the presence of a scientific booger eating moron. Run from them and hang on to your wallet which is what they really want.
When the subject of carbon emission comes up I try to join in by bringing up the dangerous hydrogen brought up to the surface via innumerable wells in our community, which is then dumped into the local sewage system by everyone in the community.
Nobody gets that I’m talking about H2O the way they are talking about CO2.
SR
Tom Steyer has replaced Goldman-Sachs as the face of the evil vampire squid sucking the life sustaining nourishment from families to fatten his green renewable energy hedge funds.