It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.
So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.
From euronews.green we have a piece from November 12 with the headline “Powered by wind and water: The Canary Island proving it is possible to run on renewables.” The byline is Lauren Crosby Mendicott. Ms. Mendicott announces the exciting news that one of Spain’s Canary Islands, El Hierro, has recently reported that it ran its electricity system entirely on wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. Excerpt:
The smallest of the Canary Islands has achieved a record of only using wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. . . . [T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources. Its 10,000 inhabitants and local government are equally committed to the sustainability of the island.
Wow, that’s great! But OK Lauren, tell us more. If the system ran on just wind and water power for 28 days, what happened on days 29, 30, 31 and thereafter? Can we expect that with just a few tweaks the system can get to running 365 days a year on its wind/water system without fossil fuel backup? Or is it in fact nowhere close to that goal? Unfortunately you will not find any information on those subjects in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
As readers here know, I have been somewhat focused on the El Hierro project for several years, because it is the closest thing in the world to an attempt to build a demonstration project to show that wind power combined with energy storage can create a fully-functioning electricity grid without fossil fuel backup. I have had numerous pieces over the years dealing with the results of the El Hierro project, most recently this one on September 30, 2023. My conclusion from the data available at that time:
The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year.
The El Hierro system has wind turbines and energy storage from a pumped hydro system with nameplate capacity seemingly well in excess of peak electricity usage on the island. So theoretically they should have no problem getting all of their electricity from the wind/storage system — right? And yet, when you look at their annual data, somehow they only seem to average about 50% of annual electricity from the wind/storage system. Sometimes it gets to 70% or so for a few months, but then at other times it drops back to as little as around 30%. When I visited the Gorona del Viento website back in September, I found data for what it claimed as hours of operation on “100% renewable” generation for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — and nothing thereafter. For some reason, they had stopped reporting these data after 2020. The numbers were 2300 hours in 2018, 1905 in 2019, and 1293 in 2020 — a rather precipitous ongoing decline. Given that there are 8760 hours in a non-leap year (24 x 365 — likely beyond Ms. Mendicott’s math skills) these numbers represent shockingly small percentages of the annual operation of the system, declining from 26.3% in 2018 to only 14.7% in 2020 (a leap year with 8784 hours).
Going back to the Gorona del Viento web site today, I find the same figure of 1293 hours of “100% renewable” generation for 2020, and no subsequent data. Maybe those data are lurking somewhere in the Spanish-language portions of the site where I can’t find them. But somehow I think that if they had some great news to report on that subject, it would be front and center.
El Hierro is blessed with a rare near-perfect site for a pumped-storage hydro facility, with a volcano rising nearly straight up from the sea and a big crater on the top to store the water. Here is a picture of the shoreline, with the mountain rising nearly perpendicular out of the water:
And yet, despite having such a rare near-perfect site for a large pumped hydro storage facility, the El Hierro system does not have nearly the energy storage needed to provide full-time electricity from the wind/storage system. It would need to multiply its storage capacity by at least an order of magnitude to come close to 100% electricity from this system. Meanwhile, most of its electricity comes from a backup diesel generator — a fact nowhere mentioned in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
So, is the piece mere incompetence, or intentional fraud? Several factors would seem to give strong support to the inference of intentional fraud — failure to mention the diesel backup at all; failure to mention the number of hours in each recent year where the diesel backup had to be called into activity to keep the lights on, and whether that number of hours was trending up or down; failure even to consider how much energy storage would be needed to enable the system to operate full time without the diesel backup, and whether there are any plans to provide that amount of storage or at what cost. Is it possible that someone could write a piece on this subject without even being aware of these issues? You be the judge!
I often find myself trying to answer the basic question Francis Menton asks: Incompetence or Intentional Fraud? It appears to me that his choice of Intentional Fraud is correct, however with a caveat: Justifiable Intentional Fraud. Alarmingly large segments of the population have been so brainwashed by the constant doom-and-gloom CAGW proclamations that they believe it. Their friends believe it also, so they have Group Think validation. Reality awaits.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t understand how intentional fraud could ever be justifiable.
Noble cause corruption. Many, if not all, alarmists believe it is their sacred duty to lie to us. It is the way of things.
See the famous Stephen Schneider quote here on this page.
He came right out and said pretty much what you just wrote.
In the heydays of 1990, most scientists sincerely believed in an impending crisis. After a 25 year forecast proved by actual observation to have been 300% too high (anomalous increase), and this followed by an 18 yr hiatus in warming, the reactive behavior of the “consensus” is a prima facie case of deliberate fraud.
Moving the goalposts from which the warming was measured from 1950 back to 1850 and fiddling temperature data to cool the past and augment present T readings was akin to erasing your crime scene fingerprints and establishing a false alibi. Throw in intimidating and canceling objecting witnesses and any district attorney would agree is a slam dunk.
You mean evil done in the name of good? The worst type of evil.
People still occasionally talk about the burning of witches, boiling people in oil, and burning people at the stake from the Middle Ages, it was so bad.
Howard Zinn promoted the lie for political ends. Zinn is a sainted figure to most academics, right down to K.
I’d expect kids are exposed to directed lies right from the start of their time in school.
And by the time they reach high school, many may be baldly taught that lying for the cause is a good thing. Ms. Mendicott may well be a product of that education.
“It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true”
George Costanza
It’s simply the pervasive liberal/progressive mind set that “the ends justify the means”. That’s a philosophy that provides justification for committing a nearly any imaginable atrocity from vandalism of works of art to blocking highways to Hamas terror attacks on Israel. Exhibit Z – Palestinian supports chanting “by any means necessary”.
Neil, I don’t believe it is either, but the deranged CAGW crowd believes it. If you are in mid-20´s your whole life has been exposed to the CAGW Doomsday nonsense. Same with Trump is a Russian Agent, Israel intentionally targets Palestinian children, Biden is fit and ready to go, etc.
Putin is Trump’s idol, rich beyond belief with total control of his country.
Maybe you oughta clue in the FBI, f-tard
Actually I believe scvblwxq may have been adding to Ron Long’s list of nonsensical ideas from the left field. Of course putting it up here with no comment or explanation was going to attract a LOT of negative comments and downvotes.
Richard, at least please change your comment “left field” to “right field”. Thank you.
Po’s Law…impossible to know what he meant.
Unless this commenter has a history that we can check for the general sensibility of the person.
Xi Jinping is Joke Biden’s idol….total power and total wealth.
Yes, especially when one considers the billions of dollars at stake if the deception is proven in a criminal case.
It’s massively profitable and it’s massively successful in increasing government power.
Remember, all government is simply a self legalising protection racket that doesn’t protect, comprised of public servants that don’t serve the public. Inventing problems it never intends to solve.
The truth is a martyr to the greater good. ~ More Soylent Green!
What is truth, anyway. Your truth, my truth, sure, but the truth? It was always just a construct created from concensus. Thus we prove that truth is whatever people believe to be true.
Utter rubbish. The truth is not based on consensus. It doesn’t care if the majority think the world is flat and the centre of the universe as the majority once did. The truth just is. It never changes. It is omnipresent, universal and eternal. You may change your opinion about what is true but truth never changes.
Paraphrase:
“Reality [truth] is what remains even after you stop believing in it.”
You forgot the /sarc.
You would have to be a complete ArtStudent™ to believe that the philosophical model that the world is all in our minds is the most simple and effective one.
Only the postmodern Marxists claim that, and they are twonks of the highest order.
And one wonders why they don’t just imagine their problems away.
This gloom and doom topic was front and center on Thanksgiving. They were all weighed down by this enormous existential crisis. I grappled for a moment that this was what they were all so worried about, but so it was.
Group Think reminds me of the Japanese plan that resulted in The Battle of Midway.
Looked great on paper. But one of the Japanese admirals at sea said words to the effect, “This will only work provided the Americans react exactly as we expect them to do.”
Green energy will work provided the pinwheels and solar panels output is what we expect them to be and grid scale batteries are developed soon and everybody drives EVs and … etc., etc.
As you said, “Reality awaits”.
Even if the “expected” of your second paragraph were achieved, the result will still be far short of need. The only alternative is that the science of mechanics, chemistry, heat engines, physical properties, etc, mostly discovered in the 19th century. all all misunderstandings and the universe is without such limitations as current science understands. Perhaps entropy doesn’t actually win.
A good example of how a battle plan only holds until contact with the enemy.
On this subject, nobody put it better than C.S Lewis:
“ Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
One of my favorite passages!
It’s in the name. Mendicott = Mendacity. Actually that’s a cheap shot . But even she can’t be that incompetent. Who’s the editor?
Fraudsters know exactly what they are doing and why.
The people behind COVID-19 advocacy and CAGW mitigation have spent so long in the echo chambers that they illogically conclude that they can believe they know what they are doing.
Anyone who has worked in a public service setting since the late eighties will know exactly how much damage is done by these narcissistic so called managers, team leaders or whatever else you wish to call them. They get their bonuses for lying, cheating and influencing others to do the same and they do not care who they destroy along their journey – they relish the destruction. That is why the nightmare is far worse than it would be if all of the “mistakes” were just genuine.
Systematic sociopathy.
Absolutely spot on. Where I worked, we reorganized, upsized, downsized, rightsized and finally we capsized. All the while being led by the clowns leading the parade.
The Plan
In the beginning, there was a plan,
And then came the assumptions,
And the assumptions were without form,
And the plan without substance,
And the darkness was upon the face of the workers,
And they spoke among themselves saying,
“It is a crock of shit and it stinks.”
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said,
“It is a pile of dung, and we cannot live with the smell.”
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers saying,
“It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong,
Such that none may abide by it.”
And the Managers went unto their Directors saying,
“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide by its strength.”
And the Directors spoke among themselves saying to one another,
“It contains that which aids plants growth, and it is very strong.”
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents saying unto them,
“It promotes growth, and it is very powerful.”
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him,
“This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor
Of the company With very powerful effects.”
And the President looked upon the Plan
And saw that it was good,
And the Plan became Policy.
And this, my friend, is how shit happens.
One of my favorites
Ah yes, that ever evasive chimera, honest reporting on green energy. Always wilful propaganda, lying for a green dollar.
Neither, it’s stupidity
https://muckrack.com/lauren-crosby-medlicott
I don’t have X (Twitter) but her contact seems to be available at that link. Maybe someone should let her know how her article has been torn to shreds.
Naaaaahh.
Venality will win every time; there is no higher motivation than greed.
Well, there are, but they don’t pay… Not the way the Bolsheviks will pay for for this brand of poo.
The important bit is, this is yet another of the ” thousands of papers by respectable academics proving that we all need to”… die for our messiah Baal Gates?
And remember: Being incompetent and being a fraudster are not mutually exclusive .
[ Some people can multi-task! Lol ]
King Island, north of Tasmania, is another test of renewables. It was designed and run by bureaucrats, apart from the substantial diesel generation installed for the Scheelite (tungsten) mine that my employer company operated for a number of years before ore ran out.
The words about renewables claim that this King Island project is the only one in the world able to operate at 100% renewables. In real life, it usually operates with some diesel generation going. It has some help from a compliant community turning down its demands when asked.
Good enough for government work?
Geoff S
At this very moment, 60% of the islands power is coming from diesels. I believe thy typically average about 50% renewable and the same diesel.
_____________________________________________
From my file of quotes & smart remarks:
Never attribute to incompetence & stupidity,
that which is adequately explained by malice.
“We have to offer up scary scenarios…
each of us has to decide the right balance
between being effective and being honest.”
-Stephen Schneider, lead IPCC author, 1989
And when being a bit honest but somewhat effective didn’t work, honesty got thrown under the bus.
“[T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources.”
I sure get tired of hearing about “clean energy”. I always start thinking of how in India, too many people are considered “unclean”- those who do the least desirable jobs- like handling dead bodies. The cast known as “untouchables”. Using such language as “clean energy” makes fools think fossil fuels are the untouchable fuels- filthy, disgusting, ecosystem destroying, Earth destroying, causing floods, droughts, hurricanes, melting glaciers, rising seas but enriching the fossil fuel barons who knew 50 years ago that fossil fuels will destroy the planet.
This rating of some energy as clean and the rest as— unclean is as stupid and harmful as the cast system in India. A myth- comparable to the countless myths of that great subcontinent.
Meanwhile, pumped storage in Wokeachusetts is now considered another unclean, untouchable technology by climate activists who also hate solar farms on forest land and industrial scale battery systems. All we have to do, they say, is put solar on ALL the roofs in the state and parking lots and we’ll arrive at net zero nirvana. And of course, that will be much cheaper than ff energy.
Green activists oppose anything that might work. First, they promote pumped storage, in order to destroy better alternatives. Then, when it looks like someone might actually make it work, they attack pumped storage. The first countries to wake up may survive. Everyone else goes under. The irony is that the green activists go down with them. Like the scorpion on the Nile:
A frog was sitting idly beside the Nile, when a scorpion came up and asked for a ride to the other side. The frog said no, you’ll sting me. The scorpion said of course I won’t, I would drown. So the frog gave the scorpion a ride. Halfway across, in went the sting. Why did you do that? asked the stricken frog. The scorpion replied with a shrug – this is the middle east.
Further, when the mining of materials and end-of-life disposal aspects are included, the so-called “clean energy” collectors are definitely not clean.
Renewable energy on El Hierro
Of course there’s a YouTube video and I recall seeing a Netflix video on this subject. This was uploaded in 2017.
We may not know what led to human habitation on El Hierro or when it began. But in economic terms, it, and other locations on the earth, may simply not be sensible places to live in the circumstances that people now consider normal. Astronaut Frank Rubio lived for 370 days in space but that was an experiment, it couldn’t be extended indefinitely. There are areas in Antarctica that amazingly haven’t been claimed by European powers where any adventurer could pitch a tent and raise his own flag but no one has.
I’m pretty sure there is already an international agreement that no nation can claim any of it. Anyone correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah, terrotorial waters and all that. I’m leaving that typo, it segues nicely with the next observation: The Yanks are desperate for a foothold in the Arctic, but instead of following the General’s advice, they are trying to buy Greenland. As a dispersal point for depleted democracy, I am sure.
Joseph is correct, there was an international treaty in force from 1961 that Antarctica should be used for peaceful purposes only and no equipment, personnel or base should form the basis of a territorial claim. There is no end date to the treaty.
America has a possible claim in the Arctic via Alaska but they refused to ratify the UNCLOS III treaty that would have given them a stake in the Arctic (still not sure exactly why, may have been a different part of it they were opposed to). As it is USA has no claim to any part of the Arctic and the people of Greenland appear to have no wish to become part of the USA.
Yup, you’re right. It’s basically the same agreement that the South China Sea is international water.
No you’re not correct – that had nothing to do with the Antarctic treaty. The South China Sea being treated as International Waters forms part of the UNCLOS treaties which extends territorial waters (except for some waterways) and which, as I posted above, USA has not ratified.
Well, once it melts it will be a perfect place to send all the heretics.
Moscow has suffered at the hands of the Climate Armageddon
The Russian capital has been buried by unprecedented snowfall, causing chaos on roads and closing schools.
Blizzards swept through Russia on Friday, leaving the capital city and major roads buried in snow
https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/15/severe-blizzards-blanket-moscow-in-decades-worth-of-snow-causing-chaos-on-roads
Unprecedented naturally
Decades worth of snow?? How much snow is that? I always thought of Moscow as being a pretty snowy place–at least it looks like that in “Dr. Zhivago”. By my imaginative estimate, the snowfall must be at least a mile deep.
Not quite but enough for it to be blatant hyperbole. Moscow apparently gets, on average, 152 cm of snow each year so a decades worth would be, what, 15.2 metres? So that’s about an inch and a half shy of 50 feet! I don’t think the Russians got quite that much in one go.
Asian capitals are experiencing record cold as well.
It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how cold how many places get and how much snow children still see, the global temperature keeps going up, even UAH. It must be unbearably hot somewhere.
It might be that the Grand Solar Minimum is starting to kick in.
So the Russian government must have issued commands to its population to stop all use of fossil fuels, to save the nation from being buried under snow.! /sarc
Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud?
Les deux mon capitaine !
Q?
Is it a sales pitch?
Did she study creative writing at East Anglia?
This was a good article with a lot of good comments at the original website
Climate change, the claim of CAGW ahead, is a hoax to create fear by politicians and the scientists they pay to make scary predictions.
People in fear demand that their government “do something”. Exactly what leftists have loved to hear for over a century. The current climate “do something” response is Nut Zero. Leftists are only happy when giving orders.
A good leftist studies every subject. Their ultimate goal is to know mothing about everything … which will qualify a leftist to be the US President or US Vice President.
Climate scaremongering is a fraud for many reasons:
(1) Failure to make accurate long term climate predictions for over a century … but the predictions never stop, and the certainty keeps rising, current at 10(1) 5%
(2) Use of worst case assumptions to exaggerate possible future warming, such as RCP 8.5
(3) Using a worst case assumption about a positive water vapor feedback that may actually be small and/or offset by some negative feedback, pehaps involving clouds.
We do know that the predicted runaway global warming never happened in the past 4.5 billion years, with up to 0.4% of CO2 versus the present 0.04% CO2 … and possible even 4% or 10% CO2 when our planet first formed.
Other than the climate change grifters … I mean leaders … the rest of the Climate Howler Global Whiners are just useful idiots who believe everything said by their leftist government and leftist government bureaucrat scientists. The usual gullible leftists.
I WANT TO THANK the Global Whiners and their pathological lying about climate and energy (and every other subject) for inspiring me to create a blog where I recommend dozens of good conservative articles every day, that refute the usual leftist lying. Including many articles from this great website
The many millions of lifetime pageviews here, and the 670,000 page views of my climate blogs, are proof that leftist climate scaremongering can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
Honest Climate Science and Energy Blog
The brainwashing has been effective and inclusive.
Two-thirds of Republicans under the age of 30 support finding alternative sources of energy as well as 42% of Republicans overall. 90% if Democrats support it.
90% of Democrats…
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/09/what-the-data-says-about-americans-views-of-climate-change/
scv…
I bet 97% of climate skeptics would agree with “…finding alternative sources of energy”.
Note it is “finding”, NOT “funding”.
It’s just that whatever you find has to be cheaper, more practical and just as reliable as the energy system.we had before the nonsensical push to wind & solar power.
Paraphrase: “Lies, damned lies, and … polls”.
[it’s all about how the polling questions are phrased]
Who would object to find alternative sources of useful energy?
Solar and wind are not it.
Why would anyone not support alternative sources of energy if financed by private companies rather than the government and taxpayers?
It’s also easy to virtue signal when answering a survey.
Ask Americans how much of THEIR own money they would be willing to contribute to fight climate change and $1 a month or $1 a week is a typical answer … in spite of the upwards bias from virtue signaling when answering a survey that does not require you to spend one cent.
Which is easier, misinterpreting the results of polls, or asking poll questions in such way as to get any result one might wish to get?
Tony Heller’s page has this LINK quoting Dr. David Deming as follows:
“In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North America over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me.”
“I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
Here’s the You Tube of the above:
I have had this video pinned to my twitter page for about ten years now.
Still waiting for a single warmista to watch it and change their mind.
A very McLuhan-esque post. Neither the Mendicott article nor the collective response here involve any real time spent on El Hierro. Telephone calls, emails, videos, web sites and their comments are a source of information, maybe valid, maybe not, but none are actual knowledge. This pseudo-science travels around the world at the speed of light by the most sophisticated technological methods and with the most convincing graphic and literary techniques. But painting erroneous information as knowledge is a separate issue from its motivation. Both ignorance and fraud are involved.
Reductionist scientific theory, especially on something as complex as the earth’s atmosphere, is an effective way to convince the uninformed. They accept and repeat the fantasies because they come from trusted sources and/or substantiate suspicions they already have.
The existence of fraud is the most important aspect of the climate crisis. It is in the financial interest of some societal heavy hitters to consciously promote what they know, or should know, as fiction, for gain. This includes academics, media, government and business. There is a great deal of money to be made in the general acceptance of impending climate catastrophe. Furthermore, there’s no penalty if the fraud is eventually exposed in its entirety. A significant small industry exists to remove radon gas from beneath the basements of houses in the US. No death certificate has ever carried the word “radon”. No one will ever be held responsible for the the fruitless battle against invisible radon. Worse yet was the Molina/Rowlands conspiracy to portray HFC compounds, the refrigerants that raised human standards of living as much as some hydrocarbon fuels. Cheap, effective refrigerants were prohibited as a result of computer modeling that showed them destroying the ozone layer, something that’s never actually been proven but was applauded by the ignorant. The two authors of the theory are still receiving posthumous honors.
The current leaders of the climate existential crisis, from whatever branch of the industry reinforcing it, know that there’s no down side to what they’re doing. If it becomes universally acceptable, they prosper. If not, if the mechanisms to combat the insignificant changes in climate are abandoned, there will be no repercussions. They, if still living, will simply have made an honest mistake, something we all do regularly. Of course most of us don’t initiate and maintain mandatory policies that completely change the lives of billions of strangers. These modern fraudsters shouldn’t have that ability.
Story tip:
‘It’s the science issue of our time’: Museum of Science to open climate change exhibitAs the UN’s climate talks wrapped up in Dubai on Wednesday, Boston’s Museum of Science welcomes visitors for immersive experience to get a sense of the stakes
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/15/science/boston-museum-of-science-climate-exhibit/
OMG, climate change will destroy the pyramids! 🙂 🙂 🙂
They had to dig out the Sphinx…
The Boston Museum of Science is terrible- one of the worst museums I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen many across America- I love great museums. The Museum of Natural History in NYC is a million times better than the Boston Museum of Science. So it’ll be even trashier with a climate horror exhibit.
I was curious about the comments posted on the Globe’s article by the climate hysterics. Even stupider than the climate hysterics that post on WUWT- so it was effortless for me to reply to them- I get good training here. At least here, the climate hysterics almost seem to have some science background. On the Globe site, it’s just the usual “doncha know that oceans are rising, more disastrous weather, species extinction, we’re all gonna burn, blah, blah”. One person mentioned how Venice is sinking. duh! If you go to that link, read the comments at the end- you’ll see several from me, unless the Globe deletes them.
Where there is a trough, you will find pigs.
There we have it; the headline’s riddle solved with brevity, elegance and a wonderful turn of phrase!
It’s corrupt from top down, it’s usually accompanied with bumbling incomptence but that’s par for the course.
Climate advocacy and bloody mindedness
“” Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko had written to the London mayor in September to ask for the vehicles [to be scrapped] to be sent to Ukraine as they would have “enormous potential” to be deployed in a “variety of life-saving and transport roles” in the war against Russia.
But this week Mr Khan wrote to Klitschko to tell him the move was not possible as his request did not meet the “legal threshold” which requires it would benefit Londoners from an “economic, social and environmental perspective” according to the Telegraph.“”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1846251/ukraine-fury-at-sadiq-khan-for-not-giving-condemned-ulez-cars-for-war-effort
Add yet more names or nationalities to the list of people that the incompetent Sadiq Khan has pissed off. At this rate his successor will have to spend their first term just going round apologising to everyone.
“Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Or Intentional Fraud?”
Answer: both.
2021 1,328 hours
El Hierro renewable, an example of sustainability – Endesa
2022 1,008 hours
Gorona del Viento – Gorona del Viento El Hierro, S.A.
56% decline 2018-2022.
The Gorona website has a News tab. The last piece of news is dated July 5, 2022.
Sorry Eric but I think the company is in full deceit on this – with the problems and the failures to set-up the site, it cannot be run for more than a couple of hours at a time without the generators for backup. See my post downpage for an engineers expose of the problems and flaws of El Hierro.
I vote for intentional fraud. But this is not just any fraud motivated by corporate greed it is a concerted effort to destroy the West. The immigration crisis has been planned, as in Cloward and Pivin planned in order to collapse Western governments and form the new One World Government controlled by the few. Democracy and free will are a thing of the past.
Intentional fraud as a front to cover up initial incompetence, as a face-saving whitewash. El Hierro (the Iron One) is an example of good intentions wrecked by reality and incompetent design, it is impossible to get to 100% renewable power for more than an hour or two with the system they have there: https://euanmearns.com/an-independant-evaluation-of-the-el-hierro-wind-pumped-hydro-system/
Sorry – link should be; https://euanmearns.com/an-independent-evaluation-of-the-el-hierro-wind-pumped-hydro-system/
It began with incompetence. Tavg was being used for decades and just kept on being used through tradition. Tavg hides what Tmax and Tmin are actually doing and combined with the untrained just assuming that Tmax is the temperature driving any increase in the average, they assume climate change is going to kill us.
Several of us on X (Twitter) have been checking the actual raw data from various rural stations around the globe and can only find there is little to no warming occurring anywhere except for Tmin.
This should point out that the statistical basis for showing Tavg ΔT’s is increasing is suspect. Conclusions based upon faulty statistics can’t necessarily be blamed upon fraud but more likely incompetence. Yet, climate science has reached the point where feedback penalizes any in-depth analysis is occurring due to fraudulence due primarily to money. Just think about where physics would be today if government grants to study sub-atomic particles were non-existent and all the financial rewards were reaped by those who only used classical methods. Same thing is occurring in climate science.
Tmin increasing is good. According to a recent study, each year worldwide 4.6 million people die from colder weather compared to 500,000 dying from hotter weather. The cold air causes our blood vessels to constrict to conserve heat and that raises blood pressure causing more strokes and heart attacks in the cooler months.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
Story tip : The climate madness will not stop. Now those psychopaths want humans to compensate their own CO2, CH4 and N2O exhalations :
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12859057/Now-scientists-say-BREATHING-bad-environment-Gases-exhale-contribute-0-1-UKs-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html
Reduce consumption of beans as the first move.
Ok. This has gone far enough, time to defund and remove these scientists from any position of apparent authority.
And from where will come the authority to do that? So far in human history it has only come from the knife and the rope. Has science pointed to anything beyond that?
Erm you may notice I said ‘scientists’ – you seem to be implying I said something else? Defunding and removal of these scientists should be able to be accomplished by legal means without needing to resort to means of assassination as you seem to be advocating.
I was not advocating, I was observing. You seem to believe that parts of he system, such as the intelligence services, the FBI, and the Justice Department, operate on difference principals and ideologies than those scientists you deplore. I think they won’t give up one of their own unless it is to save their own skin.
I don’t think they are ‘one of their own’ and, at the first sign of a big problem, will throw those ‘scientists’ straight under the nearest bus. I’m just suggesting forcing their hand.
I have a habit of researching the writers of biased “journalism”. The common profile: freelance writer with a degree in journalism, creative writing or social studies. Rarely any STEM education at college. Usually females. Usually younger than 40 years old.
I know that I’ve reviewed a limited sample of articles, but it is interesting how often the pattern repeats.
My guess: a publisher hires the writer with instructions regarding the subject and “tone” of the piece. The writer wants the job which provides income and enhances the writer’s profile. The publisher uses the piece if it fits the agenda.
For years, I researched the writer first. Quite often I never finish the article. A man can absorb only so much propaganda without regurgitation.
The academic alarmists have been reduced to the phony “attribution science”; i.e. a form of Texas sharpshooting – fire at the barn and then paint in the target. (Start with an incident of extreme weather and try to correlate it with Climate Change.) Correlation =/ Causation.
I think you have discovered the analog, “Attribution Journalism”.
You got it dead right. Publishers are obliged (by their yearning for earnings) to publish what will attract and retain most clients, a proven lucrative tactic. Imagine how much they are being paid to purposely commission and publish crappadoodle like Miss Mendicant here…with no regard for their reputation or readership.
The real question is, of course: ” Who’s paying for this?” and back we get to our new lord and saviour, messiah Baal Gates. Because he is handling the purse for somebody we need the name of…
It’s always been fraud from 1992 onward …people that achieve degrees in science cannot be ignorant enough to believe what they claim , although they do seem to be dumb enough to believe they can get away with pseudoscience.
“Incompetence or fraud?”
Several decades ago I came to what seemed a true realization: hypocrisy is a temporary condition.
I still believe it to be true. By and large, the human mind is extremely reluctant to continuously communicate lies. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking we have an innate aversion to knowingly be wrong all the time, even when everyone around you believes we’re being right.
And so through some largely unconscious process (undoubtedly involving rationalization, information cherry-picking and the like), the mind begins to convince itself that what it is communicating is, in fact, true. When we know something to be true — really, truly know it to be true — then we know that anything which appears to contradict it must be false. And there is no reason not to play around with this falseness in order to make it conform to what we know to be really true.
Think of the cop who absolutely believes a certain thug is a drug dealer, but the raid on his house doesn’t turn up any evidence. Since the cop knows the thug is guilty, there is no harm in planting the bag of coke he conveniently brought along just in case of such a situation.
Incompetence or fraud? Yes. And neither.
But as noted already, there are exceptions. Those who have no mental problem with continuous lying, providing it serves their purpose. These people make excellent leaders.
Is that a form of cognitive dissonance?
BTW many of the Prosecutors and Judges in the current lawfare against former President Trump have naively openly expressed those very thoughts – “he’s guilty so he deserves whatever we can do to stop him”. Judicial circular reasoning.
There are also a great many group think individuals who subscribe to that rational.
These people have exceptional ability to get into positions of leadership. That is quite different from being even remotely “excellent’.
They are “excellent” for the purposes of whatever the agenda might be. It’s often been commented (at least by Heinlein, I believe) that the leaders of any religion are best when they don’t really believe in it, but can use its tenets for their own purposes. That way they can keep their eye on the true goal – control. The same is true for any secular “religion” from climate change activists to hardboiled Trump advocates.
Why should anyone imagine that incompetence and malice are mutually exclusive? Or that either dispenses with consideration of any or all of the other seven deadly sins?
Consider the behavior of politicians: incompetence or corruption or a combination of the two?
Cognitive dissonance.
Obviously this is deliberate deceit by purposeful omission.
This example is a very good microcosm for the entirety of AGW reporting. Among other nefarious methods for pitching the AGW message.
The width, depth and frequency of this public deception journalism is seemingly limitless.
In the USA it is distinguishing issue between Democrats, the champions of this deceit, and Republicans who do not.
On issue after issue there are equally stark distinctions.
There is not nearly enough mention of who it is perpetrating this intentional fraud.
Long exposure has revealed that consensus climatologists are incompetent. They lack the training to judge the physical reliability of their own data and models.
They are sincere in their AGW belief, because they don’t know that they don’t know. But they’re hostile toward finding out that they don’t know.
That attitude is a special form of incompetence — one directly analogous to the intransigence of a religious or political demagogue. It cements their position as not-scientists.
The whole AGW thingy can be summarized as the incompetent leading the opportunistic.
To diagnose Ms. Mendicott as a fraud requires that we know both her state of knowledge and her conscious internal intent. One difficult, the other impossible.
What we can say is that her essay is grotesquely misleading. And it is evidence that Ms. Mendicott, too, is incompetent.
She either did not do her research or she chose to suppress the truth. The first is incompetence in fact and the other incompetence by want of professional ethics.
Climate science appears to be populated by one semester statistics people and no training in making measurements that withstand legal and real physical science scrutiny.
What evidence for this conclusion? Read this site https://www.degreedays.net/calculation to see what HVAC folks are begining to use from ASOS stations. Integrating hourly, minute, or even second data to get accurate overall daily temperature distributions. Climate science has never even started to mention anywhere about moving to more accurate portrayals of temperature. That’s not science, it is cultish behavior of not questioning traditional, inaccurate Tavg determination.
We are fast approaching 30 years of stations that have been giving at least 5 minute data. It is time for climate science to start using more accurate depictions of temperature. If HVAC engineers can do it surely climate science can also.
Climate scientists are relying on programmers who have no clue. I have been dealing with two on Twitter that have no compunction about using simple averaging and ignoring the variance of the random variables they create on the way to a “global average ΔT”. Measurement uncertainty is foreign to them and they see no reason to deal with it.
Mendicott, as a free-lance writer makes a living writing articles people pay her to write. She is just following the easy money. Her article would not sell if she wrote about the problems with renewables. She is not incompetent and is not a fraudster. She is a paid propogandist.
Read InsideEvs or other such green sites and they are filled with paid promotions for green tech. I read them for the entertainment value, not for technical analysis.
Well, this calls for an independent unbiased judge….Mikey Mann sez he is available ….for a small fee.
I don’t believe you. Mikey would require a very LARGE fee. 😉
El Hierro is not a poster-child for living in a energy transitioned world.
It is a tiny place with a population only about 3X that of some large residential buildings in the large cities of the world, or 2X the newest large cruise ship Icon of the Seas. Buildings are limited to two floors.
The temperatures are neither dangerously low nor high.
The energy section of the Wikipedia page has numbers through early 2018.
Wind and hydro.
Greens push to build more windmills but not more dams. Some even want to remove existing dams.
Yet they’re more than happy to add hydro power numbers to “Green energy output totals” to make “Green energy” appear to be approaching viability.
What portion of El Hierro “Green energy” is from wind alone?
All of it that isn’t from diesel. Pumped hydro creates no energy, it just redistributes energy in the time domain.
It’s not complicated, W&S has limited value. I always wonder if the W&S aficionados really don’t understand that. Are they pretending that they believe wind and solar are “cheaper than fossil fuels” and that because “the wind is always blowing somewhere and the sunshine always shining somewhere” that with a proper grid all electricity can be provided by W&S cheaper than with “fossil fuels”?
If they know better, then they are lying, if they actually believe it, they are simply “less than wise”. I have a difficult time convincing myself that people with a PhD don’t know any better. I have to conclude that they have a career or investment portfolio basis for their stated position. They must be liars.
There are a lot of believers out there that have no understanding of what they believe. They just find it easy and comfortable to believe the “consensus”. Why else are there “scientists” if they are not trying to extend knowledge and possibilities?
The problem with their system is it is undersized by about a factor of five. The upper reservoir is a tiny pond (8-10 acres). Wind power is five 2.3MW wind turbines. Why is the installation so undersized? Was the actual power production from the turbines was wildly overstated to give an appearance of viability and affordability? It must have been disappointing to build this installation and find out electricity on Tuesdays and Fridays was the best it can do.
Oddly enough, the number of turbines is not the issue – they are in an ideal spot, on a large hill, where the trade winds provide excellent wind speeds that could be the poster child for renewable energy. Problems occurred with the siting, sizes required and a host of other factors that undermined the validity of the site. Valverde is smack bang in the worst position for the hydro system, limiting the size of the reservoirs and pipe runs. It was initially thought that they would use the volcano crater as the upper reservoir but, with the limits imposed by the lower one it was realised they’d then have to dump 2/3rds of the fresh water into the sea. El Hierro, far from being a great example of renewables, is a case study in how not to build a renewable system and a definitive case of ‘if you want to get there, you can’t start from here’.
I have looked at a number of net zero plans and while I do not agree with them none is technically incompetent. They all admit that new technology is needed but we have 25 or more years to go so one cannot say the plan is impossible.
For example Tesla uses hydrogen for storage. Others use a lot of carbon capture to retain fossil fuel use. IEA uses a lot of nuclear. The Brits use a lot of biofuel plus hydrogen.
So they are neither incompetent nor fraudulent, just wildly optimistic.
Wildly optimistic being heralded as 100% successful must, surely, come very close to fraudulent? The header article appears to show El Hierro as a success, as being all-renewable powered for months at a time when, in reality, an engineers assessment seems to be that it cannot be run for more than a few hours at a time without the generators. The company building the site had an ideal site then reality kicked them in the behind, resulting in an unworkable system – despite being lauded by the author, Ms. Mendicott, as a hugely successful renewable system.
Perhaps I should’ve changed that to wildly (over) optimistic.
>> Incompetence or Intentional Fraud
Well, there are for sure honest people and good doers among the climate community and I would even grant a few of them a justified cause by any standard.
But it is the other ones, the bad apples, which are clearly visible and the fact that this particular community cannot deal with them, which of course puts any climate alarmist in a bad light, they stand together (which seems somewhat natural), so they fall together.
One of the most obvious persons is Mann and his hockey stick publication. It has various flaws and misleading statements, but also a very clear and obvious omission, which really needs no expert to detect (yet, with McShane and Wyner we have two experts putting this critique in peer review):
“””
[..]Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.[..]
“””
Why is this paper not corrected or withdrawn, a very simple question.
(and no the answer cannot be that other articles support it in any ways, it MUST stand on its own)
This is fraud for personal gain, plain and simple!
I suggest that you have look at the Spanish part of the website. It is completely up to date. There are excel files full of data. They may contain the information that you think is missing. It is a bit early to pass judgement.
“Diogenes, also known as Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism. “
“Diogenes the Cynic, who went around the sunlit streets of Athens, lantern in hand, looking for an honest man. This same Diogenes, when he heard Plato being praised for defining man as “an animal, biped and featherless,” threw a plucked chicken into the Academy, saying, “Here is Platonic man!”“
“[T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island“.
I have greater respect for those who think its a simulation.
There is some maximum amount of energy that can be extracted from the wind on that island. Even if established science (not consensus science) is grossly wrong about the maximum possible conversion from wind energy to electrical energy, there is some maximum amount of wind energy that sweeps across the island, on average.
The only alternative to that is new technology that allows useful wind extraction from the occasional heavy storm or hurricane when current technology requires the wind turbines to be shut down for their own good, but then, since such storms are not all that common, there is still some maximum amount of wind energy that visits the island.
This means that even with an order of magnitude more storage capacity, or 6 orders of magnitude of storage capacity, there is a significant limitation to acquiring the energy to fill that storage so it is quite probable that no number of wind turbines and storage capacity could ever fulfill all the island’s energy needs. Maybe it is possible for human life to still exist under primitive conditions, in poverty, but quite unlikely in any great comfort.
This is aside from the significant amount of published evidence, on which I have yet to see a single factual refutation, of the detrimental effects of regularly occurring industrial infrasound, produced in abundance by the currently popular type of wind turbines, that is likely inducing a high incident of various aliments and shortened life spans among the captive residents.
The Green advocates are always trying to pull such stunts. They’ll take some town with a small or tiny population and claim that because it has made some environmentally-friendly gimmick work for a limited period of time, there should be no problem adopting it 24/7/365 for an urban area of 10 million. Except none of this has been done yet, so we should dismiss news of these marvelous breakthroughs without wasting time reading about them.
We have the same nonsense from King Island, off the coast of Tasmania. They have wind and solar, with batteries and a flywheel for storage. They also have diesel generators.
They claim –
You’re seeing in real time the dashboard for our King Island renewable energy solution. It is based on contributions from wind and solar and the enabling technologies that improve system security and reliability, such as battery, dynamic resister, flywheel and demand side management.
No mention of diesel in that blurb (perhaps it’s part of demand side management) but at midday today wind was providing 16%, solar 1% (don’t know why) and diesel 60% with some also coming in from the flywheel. The batteries were taking some power.
In the years I have been watching King Island I have never seen a day when diesel is not suppling a major portion of demand.
Heres the link.
https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/hybrid-energy-solutions/success-stories/king-island
Fraud, by omission. They know, that if they give the ‘full picture’, their narrative won’t stand up to scrutiny. In some cases, it is relatively minor, but in this instance, it is significant, and deliberately intending to misleading the readers.
I think it is incompetence first, because the “science” of the climate change is demonstrated to lack the fundamentals in physics and chemistry; it was done below standards of investigations, way below what the USA government asks like the industry to prove the industrial studies on safety and purity of products: validations, certifications, etc.
100+%. Statistical novices.
It’s more subtle than that. It is deliberately cultivated ignorance so that one can claim, like the famed Tony B. Liar over te Iraq war ‘I believed that what I was doing was right’
So that’s all right then Tone, having simply accepted a dossier that was faked, at face value and by deliberately not questioning its veracity you took our nation to a war against the wrong enemy for all the wrong reasons with no plan as to how to ever finish it.
On the basis that deliberately cultivated ignorance is not a crime.
“It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true”
George Costanza
Climate advocacy is rooted in public opinion generated by propaganda mills in both in the scientific press and popular media. Strictly speaking, much of the political rhetoric we consume is borderline fraudulent because it intentionally hovers over many truth boundaries strategically to impact opinion. Truth has been become elusive and untouchable in our internet world.
125 years ago, journalists regardless of their religious or political stance would eviscerate stupid babble and shadowy lies shrouded in false logic. This is because our top journalist were true intellectuals of the highest order. How can great intellectuals exist in a thought world were the metaphysical doesn’t exist, truth is subjective and authority is rooted in the deepest pockets and the loudest lies.