Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to University of Texas Associate Professor Fernanda Leite, last winter’s Texas ice storm which knocked out the state’s wind turbines and caused widespread power outages proves more renewables are required.
Nov 23, 2021
We All Must Rise to the Challenge of Climate Change
By: Fernanda Leite
Columns appearing on the service and this webpage represent the views of the authors, not of The University of Texas at Austin.
We’re feeling the impacts of climate change all around us. Rising temperatures are changing our landscapes and livelihoods. The Great Barrier Reef is suffering from thermal stress that contributes to coral bleaching — more than half of the reef’s coral cover was lost between 1995 and 2017. In July, several European countries were severely affected by floods. Globally, eight of the world’s 10 largest cities are near a coast. And in the United States, almost 40% of the population lives in coastal areas, where sea level plays a role in flooding and land erosion.
Nowhere are climate stressors more obvious than in Texas. Our population is expected to nearly double by 2050, and most of the state has warmed between 0.5 and 1.0 degree Fahrenheit during the past century. We are seeing new diseases spread from tropical areas, and we’re experiencing more extreme weather events such as the winter storm that left two-thirds of Texans without power and almost half without water for an average of more than two days in February.
We need to urgently decrease emissions. And Texas needs a statewide climate adaptation plan.
Rising temperatures are caused primarily by an increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. CO2 levels have been rising steadily for more than 100 years due mainly to the burning of fossil fuels, trapping more heat in our atmosphere and contributing to climate change.
A special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes climate scientists from around the world, has said that human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming above preindustrial levels. And global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.
This is precisely one of the goals of the United Nations Climate Change conference, or COP26, which has brought world leaders together to tackle climate change. Countries are being asked to set ambitious 2030 emission reduction targets that align with reaching net zero by the middle of the century.
We all need to do our part like a true phase-out of coal, accelerating the switch to electric vehicles and investing in renewable energy. There are positive examples around the world of countries that are heading toward a low-carbon future by embracing solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy sources. Texas produces the most wind energy of any state in the United States. The U.S. as a whole has the second highest installed wind energy capacity in the world after China. A clean energy revolution must continue to happen across America, underscored by the steady expansion of the U.S. renewable energy sector.
Not only will setting ambitious emission reduction targets help with climate change, it will also lead to cleaner and more resilient cities and infrastructure systems. Energy systems with high percentages of renewables — or even decarbonized power grids — are better able to resist shocks than those heavily dependent on fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal.
Extreme weather events such as this year’s winter storm, which happened only nine months ago, are expected, and we need to adapt our infrastructure to withstand such stressors. And we especially need to take into consideration vulnerable communities, those that already suffer from chronic stressors related to toxic pollution, poverty, food insecurity, mixed immigration status and gentrification. States and communities around the country have begun to prepare for climate change by developing their own climate adaptation plans, so we have many examples to follow just within our own country.
Our world leaders need to leave COP26 with actionable goals with deadlines that are concrete, realistic and meaningful. And policymakers and leaders in Texas must do their part and adopt and accelerate measures that combat climate change, addressing energy infrastructure and equitable resilience. Only then will we rise to the challenge of climate change.
Fernanda Leite is an associate professor and the John A. Focht Centennial Teaching Fellow in Civil Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She serves on the leadership of a university wide grand challenges initiative called Planet Texas 2050.
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express News, Abilene Reporter News, MSN and Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
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Source: https://news.utexas.edu/2021/11/23/we-all-must-rise-to-the-challenge-of-climate-change/
The claim that more renewables could have saved the day is easily refuted.
To be fair, 7% of wind capacity apparently kept producing, at least some of the time, so wind surprisingly wasn’t completely useless. I’m guessing solar wasn’t much use during the ice storm.
But how much wind would have been required to keep the lights on, if Texas went 100% renewable?
100% ÷ 0.07 = 1428% – the original 100% = 1328% above 100%, or 1328% overcapacity.
It is hypothetically possible wind could have carried the load, though this is a very rough calculation which takes no account of availability of turbine sites, or variation in output around the 7% average, but the 1328% standby wind overcapacity Texas would have required to match the performance of gas during last winter’s ice storm would be impossibly expensive to build and maintain.
Fernanda couldn’t be more wrong.
I would have to debunk every sentence in her article to do it justice.
Just assume that nothing she said resembles reality because that’s the case here.
I live in the Texas panhandle and we had neither wind turbines nor power interruptions here. But about 40 miles southeast of here is a major wind farm where they lost power. I’m not claiming cause and effect, but it is a bit of data.
Among other things, it’s amazing how the people that say we need to listen to the IPCC have no idea what the Panel is, or who the members are.
Here is a sample of IPCC getting it right (plus a couple of others):
1. The Earth only warmed 0.78degree C since the start of the industrial age.
Pg. 209 of IPCC WG1AR5
2. Man only emits 6% of total annual CO2 emissions (Nature emits 94%).
Add the numbers on the NASA diagram at NASA’s earth observatory Cabon Cycle diagram
3. CO2 only causes 26-32% of the greenhouse effect. (H2O is 60-75%)
wikipedia – Greenhouse_effects (based on Table 3 of: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 78, No. 2, February 1997 )
4. We do not have enough data to say that hurricanes have increased.
pg 178 of WG1AR5
5. We do not have enough data to say that storms have increased.
pg 178 of WG1AR5
6. Sea level has been rising for centuries, it HAS NOT RISEN FASTER recently.
Page 306 of WG1AR5
7. There is little, if any, global scale changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods.
pg 230 WG1AR5
8. Confidence is low for a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness
pg 178 of WG1AR5
9. Long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
Page 774 of IPCC third Assessment Report (2001) Section 14.2.2.2
This means that there is NOTHING UNUSUAL about today’s climate and thus NOTHING to explain with man’s CO2.
Here is a version with full links:
Here are Quotes & Facts from the IPCC (which is considered the bible of climate), NASA & the Bulletin of the American Metrological Society.
(You may have read other claims from the IPCC, usually from the Summary For Policy Makers without knowing that the summary is actually a political document written, word by word, by politicians from many countries including those looking for cash handouts. The below is from the science part of the report.)
1. Earth only warmed 0.78 degree C up to 2012.
“Using Had-CRUT4 and its uncertainty estimates, the warming from 1850–1900 to 1986–2005 (reference period for the modelling chapters and Annex I) is 0.61 [0.55 to 0.67] C (90% confidence interval), and the warming from 1850–1900 to 2003–2012 (the most recent decade) is 0.78 [0.72 to 0.85] C (Supplementary Material 2.SM.4.3.3).”
Pg. 209 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
2. Man emits about 6% of total emissions.
Add the numbers on this NASA diagram: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/CarbonCycle/page1.php
3. CO2 causes only about 26-32% of the greenhouse effect. H2O causes 60-75%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect#Greenhouse_gases which is based on Table 3 of: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 78, No. 2, February 1997 –
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281997%29078%3C0197%3AEAGMEB%3E2.0.CO%3B2
4. We do not have enough data to say that hurricanes have increased.
“Confidence remains low for long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone activity, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities.”
pg 178 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
5. We do not have enough data to say that storms have increased.
“Confidence in large-scale trends in storminess or storminess proxies over the last century is low owing to inconsistencies between studies or lack of long-term data in some parts of the world (particularly in the SH). {2.6.4}”
pg 178 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
6. No evidence that normal sea level increase has accelerated.
(Note that sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age – the issue is whether it is rising faster.)
“When a 60-year oscillation is modeled along with an acceleration term, the estimated acceleration in GMSL since 1900 ranges from: 0.000 [–0.002 to 0.002] mm yr–2 in the Ray and Douglas (2011) record, 0.013 [0.007 to 0.019] mm yr–2 in the Jevrejeva et al. (2008) record, and 0.012 [0.009 to 0.015] mm yr–2 in the Church and White (2011) record. Thus, while there is more disagreement on the value of a 20th century acceleration in GMSL when accounting for multi-decadal fluctuations, two out of three records still indicate a significant positive value. The trend in GMSL observed since 1993, however, is not significantly larger than the estimate of 18-year trends in previous decades (e.g., 1920–1950). “
Page 306 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
7. No evidence that floods have increased (per IPCC)
“AR4 WGI Chapter 3 (Trenberth et al., 2007) did not assess changes in floods but AR4 WGII concluded that there was not a general global trend in the incidence of floods (Kundzewicz et al., 2007). SREX went further to suggest that there was low agreement and thus low confidence at the global scale regarding changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods or even the sign of changes.”
pg 230 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
8. No evidence that droughts have increased
“Confidence is low for a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century, owing to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and geographical inconsistencies in the trends.”
pg 178 of https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_all_final.pdf
9. Prediction of future climate is not possible.
“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. “ https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/501.htm (IPCC third Assessment Report (2001) Section 14.2.2.2, page 774) and Page 771, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/TAR-14.pdf
This shows that THERE IS NO CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
Also see: http://www.debunkingclimate.com/arguements.html
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate/alarmist_claim_rebuttals_updated/
Thanks for the excellent post, JimK.
I sure hope Griff read all that.
Devastating post, JimK! Many thanks.
Wonder if, after reading your comment, Tech elites will rule you, the IPCC or the ignorant professor are misinforming society?
To be fair, why are you quoting AR5? AR6 is the current version.
The IPCC’s AR6 isn’t finalized yet, it says on the 2nd page:
This document is subject to final copy-editing.
Here’s the LINK to the pdf file.
In other words, The Big Kahunas are going to go through it and rewrite stuff that they don’t like. So why would anyone bother to quote it? What needs to be done is save a copy on the WayBack Machine so the before and after copy-editing versions can be scrutinized.
AR4: Concluding line from the basic report, “the balance of evidence suggests no discernible Human influence on climate”, which was changed for “scientific” accuracy by the activists to, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible Human influence on climate”!!!
It’s wonderful just how easy it is to manipulate language to produce the desired effect!!! It is all part of the slippery slope!!!
I believe that was the 1995 2AR, Alan, courtesy of an unrepentant Ben Santer.
AR5;was published November 2014. Did the climate (not weather – there is a difference) really changed that much in seven years?
So all the results of AR5 are obsolete in seven years?
Are you suggesting that nothing in the 5 previous reports is valid because AR-6 is hot off the press? That’s an absurd idea.
There has been no or very little “new” science since AR4, & even that fairy tale was strewn with errors!!! AR5/6 are nothing more than ramping up the scary story exercise, & every UNIPCC publication will be the same ramping up of a scary story!!! There is no climate emergency/disaster/chaos/crisis/catastrophe/breakdown, etc, just bad & or good weather here & there!!! Enjoy the Holocene while it lasts!!!
Sounds like the material for a new edition of “Goosebumps”.
AR5 is the current final AR.
When AR6 releases the final report then it will be the current version.
It really does not matter. The entire IPCC process is corrupt. While information in the actual report may be useful, that’s not what gets publicized. What gets publicized is the Summary for Policymakers and that is where the corruption occurs. While the attached blog post is now 6 years old, I doubt the process has changed.
https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2015/09/01/3-things-scientists-need-to-know-about-the-ipcc/
Somewhat naively, I used to think that the Summary for Policymakers was a summary written for policymakers who were too busy, lazy, or stupid to read any of the whole thing. Only around AR5 did I come to realise that they sent their minions to negotiate what it said.
It is a Summary for Policymakers written BY the policymakers.
If they didn’t write a Summary for Policymakers that scares people, then they wouldn’t have a reason to get paid with taxpayer money.
The actual science says there is nothing to see here. It says we don’t need to worry about CO2, which means we don’t have to spend Trillions of dollars trying to regulate CO2.
But this would never do for the Powerbrokers of the world, so they scare people with the Summary in order to coerce taxpayer money out of them.
wadesworld,
I understand your feelings completely! I, myself, am holding out for AR-10; as I feel the long range accuracy will be far higher! Many people think they will be happy with AR-15 though.
But perhaps you are just trying to point out that the earlier UN reports were largely useless; I couldn’t agree more! The UN is nothing but consistent; you get meaningless reports, institutional corruption and the sexual abuse of women and children, ad nauseum!
Because before AR5 the science was settled meaning there is actually no reason to have AR6.
Reality is solar heating of 102 watts -67.11°C. The point where cooling (expansion of air due to lower pressure) w/ height has stopped by solar heated air at 11km. It is a known fact that compressing air increases pressure therefore raises temperature. That temperature rise for the whole atmosphere adds 64°C(199 watts) increased temperature from -67.11°C. Surface heating by the sun makes up the variable temperatures at the surface. It is a know fact that moist air is cooler than dry air. The greenhouse effect ignores both of these facts. The quantity and known energy capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide fails greenhouse gas credibility.
Dry air scenario(air expands when heated reducing convection)
Moist air scenario(expanded heated air allows water to evaporate and carry more heat from surface). If under high pressure keeps moist heated air close to surface but still less than heated dry air. With global temperature network coverage inadequate (now and even more so in 1900) the increase in temperature is merely a guess.
To four significant digits of temperature?
1. The Earth only warmed 0.78±1 degree C since the start of the industrial age (95% CI).
3. CO2 only causes 26-32% of the greenhouse effect. Climate models have no attributive value.
JimK, you seem to be all hung up on the facts. That’s old fashioned thinking. If too many of you guys insist otherwise we’ll probably miss the opportunity to have the biggest economic collapse in history…and worse…miss the combined opportunity of reduce the population significantly while greatly reducing pension and Social Security costs if it gets cold enough.
The IPCC is a global warming advocacy group – nothing more.
There is a little more than that.
The IPCC’s entire existence is dependent upon the fear of human-caused catastrophic climate change. Without that, their existence would be unnecessary and, indeed, unauthorized
Other advocacy groups can change what they are advocating, not the IPCC. Their charter requires them to study only human-caused climate change.
Or what the IPCC says either.
Of all the platitudinal statements about the intersectionality of climate change damages, her use of “gentrification” was of particular note. Hers was a mindless repetition of stuff she has heard over and over again with no backing proof.
” Hers was a mindless repetition of stuff she has heard over and over again with no backing proof. ”
Should a university professor act like this? Are they not expected to have some critical reasoning before producing their opinions? Should we call this behavior “incompetence”? “misconduct”? “carelessness”? “irresponsibility”?
Is this behavior acceptable in a university professor? Is this a good example for the students that she is lecturing?
Joao, you and I believe professors should teach students how to think, not what to think. But this premise is wrong: professors exist to glorify themselves. Universities have made this abundantly clear.
I agree. This is the outcome of a post-modern detour à la Michel Foucault that redefined the concept of “professor” two or three decades ago. Those professors of the New Kind are rather resilient and can even survive challenges as the Sokal hoax… Perhaps they are a new “variant”with higher infectivity…
Aren’t the ideas put forth by Sokal (as a hoax, as you indicate) now largely considered as main stream and correct by many in the field he was mocking?
Yes! That is why they passed the “thorough” peer review of a “scientific” journal… Though I don’t think that being considered “correct” was the criterion: in the field of those so-called “sciences”, being “possible” (within their mind frame) is enough.
Joao (and Leowaj,)
You are still under the mistaken assumption that universities are supposed to be institutions of learning!
Most have now been so completely infested with the thought parasites of Progressivism, that calling them seminaries is an understatement! And, as with all cults, rational thinking is largely taboo!
It should not be acceptable, but at this point it certainly is normal, sadly.
Fernanda is an”associate professor”. That’s a grad student who couldn’t find a job and works for the uni part time marking exams and watching students do lab experiments so that not too much equipment gets damaged…..so basically a combination tutor and baby-sitter…
You face the dilemma we all do when trying to unpack the gibberish these people produce. Refuting their drivel often requires far more work than the original, because almost everything but the author’s name must be corrected.
Rory, you have hit the nail on the head but been too kind in describing her work as gibberish and drivel. What is even worse is that tax payers are having to pay for her to write this and she has no skin in the game for whatever bad consequences flow from politicians and students listening to her.
Perhaps we need an opt in system. Those who want to pay for “climate engineering” can indicate this on their tax returns and how much. The rest of us can then spend our own money wisely and wait to see if their investment gives any returns or is simply a glorified ponzi scheme.
Ideally, yes. However, since the entire goat rodeo was intended as “a de facto redistribution of wealth”, shifting our hard earned money from the middle class of our countries to the wealthy in the “developing world”, via the UN and the power elite, it’s unlikely.
Third world leaders are gleefully rubbing their hands at the thought of foolish Western countries giving them large sums of “climate” money. It is time people in the West saw all the Aid money is dwarfed by the taxes of these countries that have been have squandered and stolen by their politicians and leaders.
Of course, the purpose of all this from Marxists viewpoint is to destroy the Western Middle Class to bring in the “new world order”. Global cooling, feminism, global warming, AIDS, second hand smoke, “2000 bug”, climate change, intersectionalism and now Wu-flu were all contrived to hamstring the middle class.
So Fernanda is a John A Focht Teaching “Fellow”?
I would suggest with teachers like that Texas is really Foched
The fact that this idiot person is a civil engineer and presumably teaches other civil engineers makes me weep .
Anyone with two neurons and a slide rule would see that what she says is complete nonsense . Full marks though for toeing the party line through hell, high water and well deserved total ridicule. I wonder if there is any redemption for this idiot.
Well, I have two neurons, and I can get a slide rule. Where exactly should I hit her with it for greatest effect?
I gather she is in the “sustainability” part of engineering; if it isn’t green, you can’t do it. No dams.
That’s exactly what I thought. What a pack of misinformation. Does anyone believe this sort of crap anymore?
Nice teeth, but nothing of substance behind the eyes…
Had they taken a small amount of the energy from the wind turbines, buffered and stored in a battery, and used this to power a low-power heat blanker around the delicate parts, I wonder if the turbines wold have frozen up. I don’t know the answer, since I don’t know the failure mechanism, but could such a retrofit harden the existing wind generators?
That said, I think Texas was foolish to put so much dependence on these fragile systems. They have plenty of natural gas and oil.
It was the blades of the turbines that froze up.
That’s a point worth considering Giordano. If they’re going to build the big bird choppers then perhaps they might consider integrating a heating fabric into the blade design. It’s an exercise in futility as far as I can understand but why not, it’s taxpayer money so why worry? /s
C’mon Doug wouldn’t it make more sense to run an extension cord from the windmill to an electric heater with a fan behind it?
Your idea is stupid 🤓
That would be worth exploring if they made money as a reliable energy source. The money is in subsidies for the nameplate rating. Any warming system would increase costs while lowering the rating, so doubly useless to the owners.
Is that so it can cook the bird for you whilst chopping it up 🙂
Dave,
I’ve still got some boxes of Spotted Owl Helper! I hear you can substitute hawk or eagle without having to change the recipe greatly!
What if you find out about the failure mechanism before you waste space on this site?
Some propeller driven airplanes certificated to fly into known icing conditions have alcohol deicing systems that weep onto the blades. Other planes have rubber boots that are inflated and deflated in flight to break off accumulated ice. As far as I know, wind turbines have neither.
Blade de-ice such as on Blackhawk helicopters runs off electrical, high power, electrical, from generators attached to the engines.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the optional cold-weather packs for wind turbines are often (always?) powered by the grid, which is often fossil fuel. If the wind isn’t blowing, there’s no way to keep them heated otherwise.
The wind turbines froze because of ice on the blades. You can equip win turbines with heaters built into the blades but it costs more and was not “expected” to cover the costs – so they were left out. If you heat the blades, the blades are heavier and therefore produce less energy, and some of the energy produced goes into the heating of the blades. Overall efficiency can be expected to drop by around 10%.
The ice covering the blades in Texas is NOT something that normally happens in the north. It is a mixture of atmospheric moisture and extreme freezing that is different. It is considered a rare event but when it happens it really piles on the ice – much faster and thicker than you normally protect a wind turbine blade from – so protecting the blades in Texas from this extreme event might cost even more than simply heating the blades as done in the north.
Retrofiring is almost impossible given the costs of doing so. Your investors will all flee leaving the company to go bankrupt. Building wind turbines is a profit driven business given the structure of state and federal subsidies – otherwise no one would bother. You know something is very wrong with this business model if you ever drive down I-20 and count the number of wind turbines actually working versus those sitting idle. Typically I see 50% to 75% of the wind turbines sitting idle when I have counted. Are they broken? Is there too much power already on the grid? Who knows.
We do have plenty of gas…but getting the gas to the right locations is difficult and requires the building of lots of new pipelines. Green activists fight this at every turn which increases the pipeline costs. It is actually cheaper for many companies to simply burn the gas off (flaring) rather than try to build pipelines to make it useful. This in my opinion is a disgrace.
“The wind turbines froze because of ice on the blades. You can equip win turbines with heaters built into the blades but it costs more and was not “expected” to cover the costs – so they were left out.”
I don’t think the freezing was the sole cause of the windmill problems.
The Southwest Power Pool, which consists of a few dozen States in the central and northern U.S., supposedly have windmills that are hardened to ice, but their windmills failed too, and the SPP had rolling blackouts, just like Texas. Windmills all the way up in Canada failed, and I think they were hardened against icing up.
They failed because the High-Pressure system caused the winds to die down over a large portion of the United States. No wind, no electricity.
Not quite the expensive battery-backed solution you propose, but the whirlygigs in extreme cold climate regions do incorporate various blade de-icing mechanisms. However, all such solutions have an adverse impact on generation capacity (added weight to blades, parasitic energy use) and return on investment/subsidy. As whirlygigs don’t whirl when there is no wind anyway, there is little point in catering for rare events such as the Texas outage when other more common modes of failure (no wind) cannot be catered for.
Icing up was really not the main problem. It was simply lack of wind, which meant that output was always going to be down very substantially. Here’s the actual wind generation over the period and beforehand.
There you go.
So we see, hardening windmills to icing may not solve all our windmill problems.
Thanks for that graph.
Here is a wind map at roughly the time of minimum output. Barely enough to turn a turbine anywhere, and only 649MW of output across the state.
That’s what happened over in Europe not long ago, too. The winds go away and put them in crisis.
”— more than half of the reef’s coral cover was lost between 1995 and 2017”
And the lies and utter ignorance continues unabated…..
Yup. It constantly amazes me that people who don’t live here seem to know so much more about our Reef than those of us who do live right next to it.
But like the “poor threatened polar bear”. the Great Barrier Reef is a (wait for it) … World Heritage Site and as such has an enormous appeal to emotion. We already know that AGW true believers couldn’t exist without the extensive use of numerous common logical fallacies.
Unfortunately there seem to be a whole bunch of dopes who do live right next to the GBR and still are clueless about it. And this is a real puzzle, why would people want to believe one of their national treasures is perishing? But some dolts seize on such bad news in high glee and then trumpet it far and wide.
Pamela, I think the problem with living “right next door” to the GBR is that the reef is, in many parts, over 100 miles offshore, so it’s quite understandable that people are clueless about it.
While I have not visited Australia I have been to other parts of the world where the big attraction is a coral reef offshore. It is hard to live in such an area and not be aware of the income such an attraction brings to the local economy. It is difficult to stroll around and not see numerous dive shops, reef tour boats, cutely-named hotels, restaurants, and resorts, and other indications that the locals earn their living from the invisible offshore reef. But given the average intelligence of our species, I suppose anything is possible.
My point was how pathetic and peculiar it is that so many people derive great joy from the reported destruction of a much-loved national treasure
She is totally clueless. Just imagining a deicing system for wind turbines that could deal with what we had, several days of freezing rain is difficult. Her not noting it was in nearly still air makes her endorsement of wind even more clueless. How, pray tell, is she to summon wind?
Big dose of hopium and lies.
Carlo, Monte;
Perhaps she graduated cum laudanum?
Standard watermelon propaganda fear p0rn, might as well have been plagiarized from all the usual suspects.
”, and most of the state has warmed between 0.5 and 1.0 degree Fahrenheit during the past century.”
Oh, the horror…
And yet somehow the whole state got reeel cold in February, go figure.
. . . and on January 18, 2021, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center forecast Texas to be “Much Above Normal” in February 2021.
You didn’t know that warm causes cold? Obviously you need some more koolaid.
How do these snowflakes managed to survive the large swings in temperature between day and night, winter and summer? Just flying from NYC or Toronto should kill those snowbirds according to the warmist scenario but instead they troop down the jetway with huge grins on their pasty white faces, shedding winter garb along the way, intent on getting to the beaches as quickly as possible. I have watched Scandinavian visitors to Ft. Lauderdale strip down to bra and panties as they waited to be checked into their rooms. What is so difficult to understand about how very much humans love warmth?
When the eco-nazis are faced with proof they are wrong, they just double down on the stupid!
Isn’t that the same school of thought that insists that if you have inflation from money printing, just print more money to cure it? But not to worry, the professor will undoubtedly have a warm house heated by fossil fuels—because sacrifices are for the serfs, not the garbage elite.
These are the same geniuses who believe that the proper response to inflation is for all the little people to simply buy less. After all, they have too much stuff as it is.
The Biden administration says we need to lower our expectations.
unless there is a republican administration
Exactly just who is this “we” in “We All Must Rise”? It’s been my casual observation that with modern Progressivism, it’s always up to someone else to do the actual work, and to pay for it.
And you want that teaching your kids time to get people like this sacked
In a rational world, that pack of falsehoods, lies, and misrepresentations she posted would be enough to have her called into the Dean’s office for a Come to Jesus moment…. Instead she probably got a pat on the back and was rehired for the next semester!
Austin is East California. Can’t expect much rationality from anyone in the area.
Hey! East California is conservative! How about “Austin is San Franciso of Texas”?
Randle,
I used to love to travel the back roads of Commifornia; it was like visiting another state, or country! If you could separate out the SF Bay Area, LA County, and the Commie Corridor (UC Davis to Sacramento,) the rest of the state would be a bright red, open carry region; much like where I reside now!
The Eco-Loons dimly sense that something is going wrong with their schemes for rebuilding Society but know that it cannot be their divine renewables that are at fault. The answer is that there just aren’t enough of their Renewable unreliables about yet and so the answer is obviously to build even more.
There is a parallel here to the Covid-19 vaccines which do not prevent infection, transmission or even death reliably and so the answer is again to vaccinate more and more people, even forcibly if necessary.
“The Eco-Loons dimly sense that something is going wrong with their schemes for rebuilding Society but know that it cannot be their divine renewables that are at fault.”
I think you are right. They are getting to the desperation stage now.
And the reason that I should give more credibility to the demands (actually, claimed “needs” of the citizenry of Texas) coming from Fernanda Leite over the demands of Greta Thunberg, AOC, Benie Sanders, John Kerry or Joe Biden is . . . ?
Fernanda Leite wrote:
“We’re feeling the impacts of climate change all around us. Rising temperatures are changing our landscapes and livelihoods. The Great Barrier Reef is suffering from thermal stress that contributes to coral bleaching — more than half of the reef’s coral cover was lost between 1995 and 2017. In July, several European countries were severely affected by floods. Globally, eight of the world’s 10 largest cities are near a coast. And in the United States, almost 40% of the population lives in coastal areas, where sea level plays a role in flooding and land erosion. ”
If that were true (which it isn’t) how would that show that man’s CO2 is the cause?
And if you cannot show that man’s CO2 is the cause, you cannot justify reducing CO2 emissions.
Nor can anyone justify the $trillions wasted on studying, on pretended mitigation or funding pointless alternative energy sources … not to mention the sheer overwhelming angst of it.
Renewables? They’re called babies. Your choice. A female, per chance a male. Sex is Her choice.
Perhaps she meant intermittents or unreliables.
As she isn’t a climate scientist her opinion doesn’t matter
Sauce goose gander
Done
But she is making money off the “sustainable” scam.
Apparently she is an Engineer. I just hope to God she stays away from designing bridges and other load-bearing structures.
I would hazard a guess that she went into engineering to meet a man. It is a sad but true fact that entirely too many women enter fields of study simply because those fields are predominated by men. Pre-law, pre-med, geology, engineering, physics, freshman year ranks of these fields of study are always full of hopeful brides. I don’t know if this has changed much since I was in school, I sure hope so!
I’ve been worried for some time that political correctness and sloppy thinking would work its way into the engineering fields. It appears I was right to be concerned.
“University of Texas Professor Demands More Renewables”–
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Bless her heart**. So long as she’s paying for them, she can have as many as she wants.
I’m already paying for enough of the bird choppers and fryers as it is. If she wants more, she can open her own pocketbook.
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**For the ‘other’ English speakers here, in the U.S. South, that’s used to denote someone is dumb or inept, a screw-up or a loser.
[Thick Southern accent] “Billy Bob was wearing a mask when he robbed that liquor store. But he shouldn’t have showed that clerk his I.D. at the register before pulling out his gun, bless his heart.”
I believe a kissin’ cousin of “bless his heart” is “lord love him”.
The Australian version of “lord love him” is rather more earthy.
Suitably, no doubt!
I was a coastal victim of the storm due mainly to incompetence, reference freeze based only on last two decades when the new millennium started, along with the other backup problems. More wind turbines are still being installed farther from the coast. Problem is like all these ‘scientific’ paper authors not doing their homework.
“We are seeing new diseases spread from tropical areas, …” THEY ARE NOT NEW! Quantitatively much more coming in, nothing to do with climate, except mostly from the tropics. “Energy systems with high percentages of renewables — or even decarbonized power grids ….” How can you be polite to someone that does not either know that it requires the windmill to turn to produce power or that we have known since the first one built that they stop when the wind dies, such which was reported to us. And of course a knowledge of carbon less than a ten year old, no offense, some even knew younger, even about windmills. Texas coastal wind dies when it’s cold in winter and hot in summer, but not so limited.
“Fernanda Leite is an associate professor and the John A. Focht Centennial Teaching Fellow in Civil Engineering in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin” Societies of Civil Engineers may have some responsibility here, at least from their administrations.
““We are seeing new diseases spread from tropical areas,”
That would be because Biden has thrown the southern U.S. border wide open and people from all over the world, with all sorts of exotic diseases are coming to the USA.
I hear southern Africa has a new variant of the Wuhan virus strain. I wonder if any people from South Africa have come to Mexico to get into the United States? Do you think Joe checks these people for diseases?
We have a dangerous fool for a president.
Her background is studying project management. I am guessing she works at a university teaching project management because she can’t DO project management. She obviously has no experience in risk management or economics.
In any case, she has absolutely no expertise in engineering solar or wind or fossil fuel power plants. She has no expertise in distributing power. Therefore she is expressing an OPINION, just like anyone else has a right to do. Never mind her OPINION is just plain wrong.
When a pressure system stalls over an area, you get no wind near the center. Man has no control over weather no matter how much people insist we do. It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you build over a given area, they can all be producing zero to little energy under the right conditions THIS is the lesson any intelligent person takes from Ice-agedon in Texas last winter.
We need more reliable power sources like fossil and nuclear. Yes, these need to be built to withstand a 20 year freezing event, but they will produce power at night even when wind is not blowing. If we have these, we do not need ANY wind or solar power for baseline energy production – zero, zip, nil.
Since I already know that governments are full of stupid people listening to people trying to squeeze more money out of them, I have invested in my own emergency power production. Yes it was expensive, but obviously given the complete and utter incompetence of ERCOT, it was necessary. Now we have the Federal government trying to make gas too expensive to use…thank you Joe Biden for your useless and incompetent policies. Apparently mass death is the only thing that will wake people up. You freeze enough people, it is going to eventually find itself on the news.
We don’t need “more renewables” we need more fossil fuels and more non-Leftist professors…
BTW, with the Left’s war on fossil fuels, there is already a severe shortage of natural-gas derived fertilizers, so fertilizer prices are going through the roof, which means even more spikes in food prices next year, on top of: the supply-chain fiasco, gas shortage, diesel fuel shortage, energy shortage, packaging material shortage, labor shortage, monetary inflation, shipping container shortage, truck and truck-driver shortage and vessel shortage crisis, which will all lead to higher prices and goods shortages the stupid Left has created…
2022 Midterm and 2024 general elections can’t come soon enough…
Let’s Go Brandon and FDNC.
Climate Change needs to be formally declared a religion. Then the First Constitutional Amendment can be applied. Speaking of amendments:
Amendment XXVIII
Congress shall make no law to regulate, tax or license
atmospheric carbon dioxide. The right of the people to
freely emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from any
source, from any place, at any time, in any amount, for
any reason shall not be interfered with.
“proves more renewables are required.” She is absolutely right! Humans need more oil, gas, coal, hydro and nuclear. These are the ONLY renewable energy sources on Earth.
So someone who is totally tied to renewable rubbish demands we use more renewables? Wow, that’s a surprise isn’t it. Pull your head out of your butt lady and see the reality of the fact that renewables CAN’T provide reliable, base-load power.
As an Aussie, I can tell you that this learned professor knows absolutely nothing about the Great Barrier Reef and seems to be parroting Obama.
During El Ninos, due to strong westerly winds, the sea levels drop and if low tide corresponds with a particularly hot day some bleaching of the reef surface corals can, and did, occur. But it was never 50% and the corals on the reef faces, going down 100m are never effected.
At the moment the Reef is in the best condition it has been for a very long time and the La Niñas of this and last year, with normal sea levels and temperatures, has led to a massive spawning at full moon this November, as usual.
The Reef has survived through warmer times than this and as one goes north into the waters near the equator corals abound in the seas are warmer than on the Queensland coast, so we have no fears that the reef will survive long after the erudite Prof is long gone.
The ship is sinking! We must all pour in more water!