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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Climate Change and Texas’ Electric Power Problems
- Podcast of the Week: The Miseducation of Science Teachers
- Green Energy Is Toxic
- Tornado Damage, Losses Have Declined Amid Warming
- Video of the Week: Gavin Newsom Should Sue Himself Over Climate Change
- Climate Comedy
- Recommended Sites
Miss Anything at Heartland’s Climate Conference? No Problem.
Climate Change and Texas’ Electric Power Problems
The manager of the vast majority of Texas’ power grid, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), sent out multiple “voluntary conservation notice[s]” this summer. There were more than I can ever remember, and I’m a native Texan who has lived here 53 of my 60 years on Earth. Even on days when ERCOT didn’t send out an official notice requesting people to conserve, television and online news outlets almost daily admonished their audiences to conserve energy: turn thermostats up, turn lights and unused electronics off, and do not use appliances during peak periods. ERCOT was warning that Texas’ spare electric power capacity was thin and outages were possible.
Summers are hot in Texas, but some summers are hotter than others, and this was one of them. It was not the hottest in history or even recent years, but it was hot. Dallas County, where I live, experienced 55 days of temperatures above 100 degrees this summer, with more with a couple of days topping 108 degrees. The year 2023 ranks in fourth place for the number of 100 degree days in Dallas since consistent records have been kept. Some daily records were broken for Dallas and the state, but the overall state record of 120℉ set in the tiny town of Seymour in 1920 and tied in the only slightly larger town of Monahans in 1994 remains intact.
In 1980, 1998, and 2011, despite experiencing more 100 degree days than in 2023, Texas did not have the kind of systemwide threats to its electric power grid it had this year. Nor has Texas ever experienced the kind of winter power outage it had in 2021, when the power for more than four million people across the state was out for most of three full days and more than 700 people perished from the cold.
Climate policies—specifically restrictions or threats of restrictions on carbon dioxide from power plants, and mandates and subsidies for wind and solar power—are responsible for Texas’ power woes.
In a previous issue of Climate Change Weekly I detailed how the collapse of wind and solar power output during the winter storm, the prior closure of baseload coal plants, and poor power routing decisions by ERCOT combined to produce Texas’ deadly winter outage.
Data from ERCOT confirm that four days before the first snowflake fell, wind and solar were providing 58 percent of the electric power used in Texas. Fortuitously, the sun had been shining and the wind blowing. These conditions ended as the winter storm hit, and within a matter of hours more than 13,000 megawatts of wind and solar power went offline. The wind died off and the turbines began to freeze, and winter storm clouds blocked the sun.
That winter storm, although severe, was not unprecedented. The widespread power outage during winter was.
Summer has always been peak power demand season in Texas, and historically we had a good margin of peak power to meet residents’ and businesses’ needs. That margin has declined sharply over the past 17 years as wind and solar power have grown to account for a greater share of Texas’ electric power capacity. Those two sources of power now account for more than 39 percent of Texas’ electric power supply capacity— much more than coal, nuclear, and hydropower combined.
This increase was not driven by customer demand but by politics. Legislators required a set minimum amount of power sold on the Texas power market to come from wind or solar power, regardless of the costs and the reliability and redundancy problems it introduced into the grid. On top of that, federal, state, and local subsidies encouraged wind and solar to grow beyond the minimum amount set by the state. School districts have gotten in on the boondoggle, issuing property tax abatements to build wind and rooftop solar so they could teach their students the virtues of going green even as they cry poverty in Austin and with local property tax auditors, asking for ever-more money.
We saw the result this summer, with near-daily warnings of imminent power failures during the heat. As the Texas Tribune noted in mid-August amid the streak of 100 degree days,
Electricity users have exceeded the record for power demand on the state’s main grid 10 times so far this summer, according to ERCOT data. …
A significant increase in solar farms built in recent years in Texas has helped meet increasing demand. Texas can also produce the most wind power of any state. But solar power declines as the sun sets. And on Thursday, ERCOT cited low wind power generation as an additional cause for concern.
Although most of those days were thirsty bluebird sunny, the extreme heat even dampened the ability of solar power to keep Texans’ lights on and air conditioners cycling. The photovoltaic cells in solar panels tend to operate less efficiently when temperatures rise above 77℉. Ecoflow writes,
For every degree Celsius above 25°C (77°F), a solar panel’s efficiency typically declines by 0.3% to 0.5%.
This decrease in efficiency can be significant in regions where temperatures rise dramatically during the day, such as deserts or tropical areas.
When temperatures were above 100℉ for weeks on end for 55 days this summer and well above 90 for the remainder of the past four and a half months—which is true as I sit in my office and write today—solar panels were producing much less power than promised. How is more solar supposed to help out in the predicted warmer world?
ERCOT has a portal on its website where one can track, almost minute by minute, power demand and supply in Texas and what sources are meeting demand. I checked it periodically throughout this summer’s heat wave, as I’m checking it now, and the story it told was almost always the same. Relatively low wind and solar output compared to rated capacity, and near maximum production from nuclear, natural gas, and the state’s remaining coal power plants. As I write at 3:45 p.m. on Wednesday, September 27, with the temperature at 95℉, wind, the second-largest source of electric power in the state (accounting for more than 25 percent of the state’s electric power capacity), is producing only approximately one-quarter of its rated capacity. Overall, it is currently satisfying just 3.4 percent of the state’s power demand.
It turns out the wind doesn’t blow very well in the summer in West Texas where most of the turbines take up space.
Solar power, the third-largest generating source in Texas by stated capacity, is operating at just 57 percent of capacity on a clear, sunny day, meeting just 14.7 percent of the state’s demand. That is 2 percent less than coal, even though coal has only 65 percent of solar’s generating capacity. And of course, as common sense tells us and ERCOT’s monitor confirms, solar’s capacity will drop to zero or near-zero as night falls, regardless of the demand for power.
Relying on green energy to keep the lights on is a pipedream—in fact, it is an increasingly expensive nightmare. That’s true not just in Texas, where electricity prices have risen inexorably in recent years as each megawatt of wind and solar has been added to the system, but across the United States and in Europe as well. Independent system operators in the United States are increasingly warning that adding more intermittent power to the grid and prematurely closing coal power is a recipe for more outages and blackouts, which have already begun trending upward with the renewable energy mandates and subsidies.
Despite all of this effort, carbon dioxide emissions are trending ever-upward because of growth in China and other developing countries, which are using coal to power their economic progress. If one believes (as I do not) that carbon dioxide is driving dangerous climate change, there is no climate benefit from these expensive U.S. mandates and subsidies for wind and solar power.
Never fear, however: there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. Politically connected green energy elites and politicians beholden to them are profiting handsomely from this boondoggle. It’s only us peons who will swelter or shiver in the dark when President Joe Biden’s net-zero goals come to fruition.
Sources: ERCOT; Texas Tribune; Climate Change Weekly; Climate Change Weekly
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Podcast of the Week
Recently a prominent science educator, Stanford’s Jonathan Osborne, opined that the goal of science is consensus. Science is a process whose purpose is the pursuit of knowledge, a process which often overturns consensus. Osborne’s statements dismiss the scientific method, and critical thinking as a whole. This view of science would leave us in towards a dark age, with progress suddenly slowing to a halt. Osborne’s view seems to be that knowledge is socially constructed, not based on evidence and measurements, with scientific discovery being reduced to the counting of hands.
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Green Energy Is Toxic
New research published in the journal Science shows the mining of metals to meet the demand for green energy technologies is polluting rivers and land and is probably harming people’s health.
Using empirically based modelling for lead, zinc, copper, and arsenic, combined with a global database of all known metal mining sites and intact and failed tailings storage facilities, the scientists concluded,
Worldwide, metal mines affect 479,200 kilometers of river channels and 164,000 square kilometers of floodplains. The number of people exposed to contamination sourced from long-term discharge of mining waste into rivers is almost 50 times greater than the number directly affected by tailings dam failures. [As a result] an estimated 23 million people live on floodplains affected by potentially dangerous concentrations of toxic waste derived from past and present metal mining activity.
In addition to the rivers, floodplains, and people affected by the pollution, the research suggests pollution from metal mining currently affects 5.72 million livestock animals and more than 16 million acres of irrigated farmland, The Daily Mail notes in its discussion of the study.
Of course, this research does not even address the pollution and health effects of lithium, cobalt, and myriad rare earth elements critical to so-called green batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. As the production of green energy continues to grow, so will the demand for the mining of these metals and critical elements.
“According to the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, green energy technologies like wind turbines and electric cars often do require many more mined minerals than the present fossil fuels infrastructure,” The Daily Mail reports. “One electric car, for example, requires six times more metallic and mineral materials than a combustion engine car, MIT’s university team reports.
“And a wind power plant requires nine times more of these mined compounds than a traditional gas-fired plant,” The Daily Mail reports.
As a result, more green energy equals more mining and a need for radically improved waste disposal to avoid “business as usual” pollution.
To date, the researchers have mapped 159,735 abandoned mines and 22,609 active mines, plus 11,587 mining waste storage facilities and 257 known cases of failed and leaking storage sites.
Mark Macklin, lead author of the study and director of Lincoln University’s Lincoln Centre for Water and Planetary Health, says the research was intended to detail current locations where metal mining could already be producing dangerous impacts while developing mitigation measures.
“We expect that this will make it easier to mitigate the environmental effects of historical and present mining,’” Macklin told The Daily Mail. “Our new method for predicting the dispersal of mine waste in river systems provides governments, environmental regulators, the mining industry and local communities with a tool that, for the first time, will enable them to assess the offsite and downstream impacts of mining on ecosystem and human health.”
Sources: The Daily Mail; Science (behind paywall)
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
Tornado Damage, Losses Have Declined Amid Warming
New research published in the journal Weather and Climate Extremes examined tornado data in the United States from 1954 through 2018 to determine whether any trends in strength and damage have appeared during the recent period of modest warming.
The team of Australian researchers (Zhang et al.) normalized the data on losses from tornadoes, using a dataset maintained by the U.S. National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center for the 65 years from 1954 through 2018. They also incorporated more detailed data on losses from individual tornado events collected since 1997. When the two datasets were combined and normalized, the researchers found, (a) for most U.S. states and in general there has been a decline in severe hurricanes, and (b) “[a]t the country level, both the severity of damage from individual events and the total annual losses from tornadoes are seen to have reduced over time … [resulting in a] national significant decline in normalized losses for tornado events.” See the graph below.
Although these findings have been largely ignored by the mainstream media, Roger Pielke Jr., Ph.D., was quick to discuss the importance of the paper’s findings.
Pielke, who has previously published peer-reviewed research on tornado damage and losses, was part of a team of researchers that provided the first comprehensive normalization of tornado losses. Their research, published in the journal Environmental Hazards in 2012, examined tornado impacts and losses in the United States from 1950 through 2011 and concluded “normalized tornado damage in the US from 1950 to 2011 declined in all three normalization methods applied (two are statistically significant[;] one is not).”
The authors of the new Weather and Climate Extremes paper explicitly acknowledge their new results confirm and extend the conclusions of the Environmental Hazards paper: “our findings reiterate the results of Simmons et al. (2013) who emphasize the importance of normalizing loss data to draw adequate conclusions about the severity of natural hazards.”
Pielke updated the data from his earlier coauthored paper with data from 2011 onwards and found tornado losses have continued to decline, as did Zhang et al.
Importantly, in addition to damage from tornadoes having declined over the past 70-plus years, Zhang et al. report incidences of the strongest tornadoes (F2 through F5) have likewise trended downward during that time. Also, Pielke notes that in nine of the 11 years since his paper was published in 2012, the United States has experienced below-average numbers of tornadoes.
Sources: Weather and Climate Extremes; The Honest Broker
Video of the Week
Heartland Institute President James Taylor was a guest on The Balance with Eric Bolling on Newsmax TV to talk about the absurdity of California Gov. Gavin Newsom to sue “Big Oil” for supposed damages the industry causes via all the carbon dioxide emissions we are all responsible for by living in a modern society. He was on the program with Heartland friend Daniel Turner, the founder of Power the Future.
Climate Comedy
Did we lose the edit button again?
Anyone know why?
Probably because it wasn’t working 😏
It’s been a few weeks since it became impossible to edit a comment – the dreaded slow down message from just trying to excise a typo from a post.
Something was patently bogging the system down with the edit function enabled.
While still active, it took an eternity from clicking ‘Post Comment’ to when the page refreshed and your comment appeared – whereas now (with Edit disabled) comments appear almost instantly.
Was there a buffer overflow or something – how did it ‘hold comments’ while leaving them open to editing. That part was crashing.
bogging the system
The moderation has gone haywire too
computer science is almost as flaky as climate science 🙂
The AI chatbots make up stuff sometimes, but they are useful.
Climate science is outright deception. They ignore the Sun and don’t take into account the benefits of warming and more CO2.
Million more people die from cold weather than from hot weather each year mainly through increased strokes and heart attacks in the cold or cooler months because our bodies constrict our blood vessels to maintain heat and that leads to higher blood pressure which increases the Irish of strokes and heart attacks.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
CO2 increases are great for crops and other plants that we need to keep living.
Did you know the Guardian has reinstated the hockey schtick?
Mann, at Penn State university in the US, has been among the most high-profile climate scientists since publishing the famous hockey stick chart in 1999, showing how global temperatures rocketed over the last century.
To understand our predicament today, Mann has trawled back through the Earth’s climate history in order to see our potential futures more clearly.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/30/human-civilisation-climate-scientist-prof-michael-mann
I thought that had been put to bed. Denial from the Mann? I think so
From that site.
The Guardian clearly doesn’t know the meaning of “eminent”.
These days more often than not the Grauniad doesn’t know the meaning of anything.
There are more cellphone cameras around the world taking pictures of extreme weather, that’s for sure. That is due to cellphone technological progress not “climate change”.
Dr Mann is no longer at the Pennsylvania State University. He is now a distinguished professor at The University of Pennsylvania.
Unfortunately, it is now the case that U of P is among the very worst of the worst, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he is now there instead of running the drive through window of a fast food joint.
Once upon a time, the best and smartest people I have ever known were students and faculty at Penn.
My parents, Godfather, Grandfather, and nearly every adult in the neighborhood I grew up in, either were or had been employed or attended U of P. Everyone from my school principle to the parents of nearly every friend I had growing up.
Once upon a time, I trained there as a competitive swimmer for the Vespers…the varsity swim team at Penn.
My girlfriend’s father was dean of the law school, her mom dean of admissions, my dad on the faculty at Wharton, my mom’s dad a distinguished professor for most of the 20th century.
I am certain nearly all of these people would be ashamed at what is going on there now.
Ben Franklin is turning over in his grave!
Out of the state pen into a fancier pen.
Here’s one of my now infamous, and growing, string of screenshots.
This one explains why Texas was hot.
(And actually The Proper Way to measure Global Temperature)
hat you see is the barometric pressure section from a Wunderground station at a place name of Tool, in Texas
Here it is I picked it completely at random and it could hardly have made worse news for Texas than it already does.
i.e. It so well illustrates my point while being next to a big lump of water – which should have deflated my argument.
It makes things even worse for Texas.
It shows barometric pressure at Tool, Texas (next to Cedar Creek reservoir for the last week of July 2023.
First thing to especially notice is the daily cycle. If you visit the station you’ll see how pressure almost exactly tracks temperature
(You know where this is headed now)
Right at the front of your mind is that Global Average Sea Level Barometric Pressure is 1013mB
(This station is at 99metres so near enough as makes no odds)
See that the pressure at Tool never dropped below 1014mB
Scan back/forward through the weeks and see the exact same pattern and numbers.
The reason that Tool in Texas, and most all of Texas, is constantly under a high-pressure ridge = it is constantly under the descending leg of a Hadley Cell.
(The upwelling leg will be out in the GoM somewhere)
The reason that Texas is under a constant flow of downwelling air, heated by the Foehn Effect and the (dry) Lapse Rate is that Texas has no source of upwelling air.
(Hence my lamentation about the reservoir)
There is no upwelling air coming off Texas because Texas is so very dry = warm moist air has more ‘lift’ than does hot dry air
(Yet again, your Kindergarten teacher lied to you – hot air does NOT ‘always rise’)
And that is why Texas was and is so very hot in summer
It is also why it got/gets so very cold in winter
There is no water in the landscape, no trees, no large lakes/rivers while everything is done to exacerbate that issue
See the picture in the reply
Texas exists under a very resistant (high pressure) ridge and everything everybody does down on the ground goes to reinforce it.
You’re lucky you got away with the temperatures you did, be thankful that Stefan’s Law operates at the 4th power of temperature and not as anything less..
just at random I dropped myself into some Texan countryside, in January as it happens.
as attached
A vision of what most people probably regard as = Hell
Bone dry, burnt out, near treeless desert.
Even in January ffs
Thsoe fields should be green and even in the depths of winter would still be growing = so as to absorb atmospheric CO₂ – storing it not especially within the visible plants, but withing their roots and within a burgeoning growth of soil bacteria.
No. All those things are dead and THAT is why CO₂ is rising = a rising deficiency of absorptions.
We are here none of us here = Kindergarten Students – so why so much Kindergarten Science?
The reason being overgrazing by livestock
(see all those ‘post and wire’ fences – they’re for containing cows)
Add in an epic growth in city building and aquifer drainage, at present rate there’ll be nothing left but mile after mile of sand.
buy candles. wrap up warm
“…at present rate there’ll be nothing left but mile after mile of sand.”
Then again, maybe not.
The next 7 days of precip is attached below.
The same weather pattern we are now entering, looks a lot like 1982.
In 1983, dams across the western US were overfull and in danger of overtopping.
The so-called permanent drought in the Western US will end with massive rains and flooding, and it will start something like what we have been seeing for the past year or so.
In 1983, plywood was all that kept Glen Canyon Dam from overflowing (azcentral.com)
This isn’t the best video about this place but it’s the only one I had the patience to hunt down today. Another I once watched went into much detail about the particular steps taken. You will see by the list of recommend videos that many other approaches have also been successfully used.
Overgrazing is a real thing but, as has been demonstrated, directed grazing using large herds has been very successful in restoring dead land.
“Although most of those days were thirsty bluebird sunny….”
thirsty bluebird sunny? Is that an old time Texas phrase? As a New England Yankee, I never heard that before.
The Texas power problems are part policy and partly just because so much new housing is getting built.
1.6 million new houses started construction in Texas last year. At about 3kW of peak load contribution each, that is 5,000MW of load growth – circa 10 new big gas plants, 5 coal or nuclear plants, or about 50 wind or solar plants need to build every year just to keep up.
Adding that much load in one year is incredible. Most other regions of the US are seeing approximately zero load growth.
For anyone worried about EVs, they only demand about 0.1kW during peak load hours. This same 5,000MW of new generation could charge 50 million EVs. Texas has 22 million registered vehicles. EVs are a big nothing-burger for the Texas power system.
Are those houses being built to accommodate the fleeing California residents? 🙂
Yeah, it is people from Cali…that’s the ticket!
Move along, nothing to see here:
Wait, what?
“For anyone worried about EVs, they only demand about 0.1kW during peak load hours.”
Is this some kind of joke?
Are you making the point that people tend to get home and plug in EVs after the typical time of peak power demand?
Using an at home charger, charging a Tesla draws anywhere from 1.8 to 19 kW, and a full charge consumes some 30kWh.
At a charging time of ten hours, that is about 3.0 kW of power draw.
IOW, the entire amount you claim a house needs.
If my Tesla is drawing 3000 watts, you can bet my whole house is using more than 3000 watts.
And for superchargers, the power draw per car is more like 150 to 250 kW!
Imagine millions and millions of people needing to recharge in a hurry during an evacuation?
(See re hurricanes below)
What is 1,000,000 times 150 kW?
Houston alone has 7.4 million people in the metro area!
In any case, the problem with current policy is the amount of time in which this transition is being forced down our throats.
It is flat out impossible to achieve. And far from building any new coal or gas plants, we have people spending billions to make sure every coal and half of gas plants are dismantled within the next 6 years.
And Texas has hurricanes.
What happens when an evacuation is ordered, and millions of people with EVs are all trying to escape death in vehicles that take many hours to recharge, just when the power lines blow down and transformers start failing?
Left to market forces and assuming a sane energy policy that emphasizes grid stability over all other concerns, there may be little to be worried about.
But that is not at all what is going on, and it is about to get a whole lot worse in a big giant hurry.
BTW, did you just conflate nameplate capacity of wind turbines with power generation reality?
There are no nothingburgers when it comes to US energy policy. Never has there been.
What we are now walking into is a shitstorm of unimaginable magnitude.
But you go ahead and pretend we all just need to relax.
restoring the ancient balance between life and death
In the past, power companies built more power plants as the population increased.
I wonder why the stopped doing that.
This recent study shows that the cold weather we have every year causes about 4.6 million deaths a year globally mainly through increased strokes and heart attacks, compared with about 500,000 deaths a year from hot weather. We can’t easily protect our lungs from the cold air in the winter and that causes our blood vessels to constrict causing blood pressure to increase leading to heart attacks and strokes.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modelling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
This article from 2015 says that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather and that moderately warm or cool weather kills far more people than extreme weather. Increased strokes and heart attacks from cool weather are the main cause of the deaths.
‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
The Grand Solar Minimum has started and is forecast to get serious starting in 2025 NOAA forecasts. They forecast that the Sunspot Number, currently around 100, will start dropping in 2025 and keep dropping to single digits in 2031 and to zero in 2040 when their forecast ends. The sunspots are cooler areas associated with hotter areas and the fewer the sunspots the lower the solar output. According to their forecast, it should start getting cool and keep getting colder until at least 2040.
There is also a paper by the solar physicist, Valentina Zharkova, who discovered how two magnetic dynamos at different depths in the Sun give the 11-year sunspot cycle and another cycle of around 400 years. She says that the Sun is going to be cooling enough to lead to a mini-ice age for around 40 years with probable crop failures starting in a few years.
‘Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7575229/
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/predicted-sunspot-number-and-radio-flux
“…and I’m a native Texan who has lived here 53 of my 60 years on Earth.”
And I have more experience working in Texas power plants. That is exactly one day.
Association is not causation!
I started my generator on two successive days because the grid went down.
I am between two wind farms. However I think it was the wild fire taking out the power lines followed by the thunderstorm the next day,
One of my jobs at nuclear power plants was doing root cause investigation.
I worked in the control room for months with worse winter weather than Texas will ever see. Never lost the plant because it was cold. It was close one night. To the south, ice was taking out power lines and power plants. We got a ‘do not touch’ warning from the grid operator.
Because it was a new nuke, there was a list of reasons why the plant was not needed.
Mr. Burnett, or anyone who believes they understand something about this,
While my question is off topic, it does relate to the topic indirectly. From the article
This NOAA web site
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/county/time-series/TX-113/tmax/3/8/1895-2023?trend=true&trend_base=100&begtrendyear=1895&endtrendyear=2023&filter=true&filterType=binomial
introduced in a recent WUWT article
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/09/22/l-a-times-article-falsely-asserts-u-s-had-record-high-summer-temperatures-in-2023/
claims that the only time since 1895 that Dallas County temperatures reached as high as 100F was 2011, when the highest temperature was 101.1. Similar values appear for the entire state of Texas.
I didn’t pay any attention to the NOAA web site until a couple of days ago when I attempted to use it for information about some areas with which I am familiar. Summer temperatures in California’s central valley reach 110F, perhaps more, fairly often in summer yet the NOAA web site says the maximum temperature since 1895 is about 94F. In southern Nevada, where I’ve spent the last two summers the highest I noticed this year was 117. Last summer it was 116. The NOAA web site says 90F is the highest ever.
Clearly the NOAA data isn’t what its labels seem to say it is. Does anyone understand what NOAA is saying, or know where an explanation exists?
Big oil! The answer is little oil. A small distillation tower could be erected in the backyard of any interested home owner. He could refine drain oil as well as crude, which could be purchased from small storage sites similar to charging stations for EVs. He could sell or give his gasoline to the neighbors, keeping their lawn mowers and garden tractors topped up. A can’t miss business opportunity that leftists would embrace.
There might be complications. A major factor in the mania for renewable energy is the lack of opportunity in the oil business. It’s difficult for an entrepreneur to get together the leased property, the equipment and the personnel to compete with EXXON-Mobil, actually impossible. So the only opportunity is renewables. There’s already been a John D. Rockefeller and a T. Boone Pickens so their spots as oil bigshots are taken. So what’s left are renewables.
If the ownership of EXXON-Mobil went to National Grid Renewables LLC and offered to swap companies, how many quick breaths would the National Grid guys take before screaming “YES”!