As media pushes fear about record “hot” temperatures, a review of the science shows our main focus should be energy security.
Posted by Leslie Eastman
Despite the elites deeming it a dirty fossil fuel, global coal use is set to reach an all-time high of 8.77 billion tonnes in 2024, marking the third consecutive year of record-breaking consumption. This surge is primarily driven by increased demand in Asia, particularly China, India, and Indonesia.
The elite media is trying to connect this data to the assertion of their proclamation it was the “hottest year on record‘.
World coal use is set to reach an all-time high in 2024, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday, in a year all but certain to be the hottest in recorded history.
Despite calls to halt humanity’s burning of the filthiest fossil fuel driving climate change, the energy watchdog expects global demand for coal to hit record highs for the third year in a row.
Scientists have warned that planet-warming greenhouse gases will have to be drastically slashed to limit global heating to avoid catastrophic impacts on the Earth and humanity.
Earlier in December, the European Union’s climate monitor Copernicus said 2024 was “effectively certain” to be the hottest on record — eclipsing the mark set just last year.
The pearl-clutching climate cultists are neglecting a few considerations in their hand-wringing analysis. To begin with, most nations (or at least those not led by western-civilization-hating eco-activists) will act in accordance with their own interests.
In other words, the Iron Law of Electricity is in effect.
This surge in demand for hydrocarbons to produce electricity proves once again, that electricity is the world’s most important and fastest-growing form of energy.
It also proves what I call the Iron Law of Electricity, which says “People, businesses, and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need,” I’ve also stated it as “when forced to choose between dirty electricity and no electricity, people will choose dirty electricity every time.
But let’s consider the assertion that “it’s the hottest year on record.”
How can these “experts” be so certain? Historical temperature data is often incomplete, with vast regions lacking measurements. In 1884, for example, there was minimal to no data available for large parts of South America, Asia, Australia, the Arctic, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and all of Antarctica. This fact was actually recognized when the media tried to gin up a panic about the next Ice Age during the 1970’s.
A 1978 New York Times article highlighted the lack of data, specifically from the southern hemisphere, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions about global temperature trends. Similarly, the Climatic Research Unit in England’s map for July 1884 exhibited significant regions with missing data, further compounding the challenge of constructing an accurate global temperature map.
Station relocations or environmental changes around stations (e.g., urban development) can alter readings. The urban “heat island effect” has been identified as a serious issue by several climate scientists.
Ocean temperatures must be considered, and there are many challenges in determining the average ocean temperature. The ocean’s immense volume makes comprehensive sampling difficult. Different areas and depths of the ocean can have drastically different temperatures. Past measurements were often limited to specific shipping routes, providing incomplete coverage. And the role of ocean currents on climate, which is important, is neglected in favor of making the life-essential gas, carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the “climate crisis” myth.
But even if this were the “hottest year on record”, would it really be only due to carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels?
I would like to introduce the Bray and Eddy cycles, two significant solar cycles that have been observed to influence Earth’s climate over long periods.
The Bray cycle has a periodicity of approximately 2450 years, and lows in the cycle are associated with colder periods and glacial advances. The Eddy cycle, also called the millennial cycle band, is related to grand solar minima, which occurs approximately every 1000 years.
The cycles tend to influence climate through several mechanisms:
- Changes in stratospheric ozone content and pressures.
- Alterations in tropospheric weather patterns.
- Impacts on wind patterns, ocean currents, precipitation, and global average temperature.
The interaction between these cycles can lead to more severe cold periods when their lows coincide..and warm periods when their highs match. While the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, plenty of evidence suggests these solar cycles play a significant role in long-term climate variability.
As many at Legal Insurrection point out, correlation is not causation.
The only takeaways from the coal use data are that countries with sensible leaders are looking to the energy needs of their citizens and that climate is too complex an issue to attribute to a gas that is 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
THis post is a mishmash. But dealing with the coal issue, here (from here) is the story on China’s electricity sector. Yes, use of just about everything is growing rapidly. But the share of coal is declining, and the share of wind and solar is growing rapidly:
But the atmospheric concentration of CO2 keeps rising fairly linearly. So the shares have no effect on the concentration, or we would see a decline in the rate of CO2 growth as well.
But we don’t.
No, the burning of coal is still rising, as the graph shows. But the generation via W&S is rising faster.
WRONG !!
Since 2010, COAL electricity increase is still over 2.5 time wind and 3.5 time solar.
If so, then there’s no transition, just addition.
China may be a big country- but where will they put all the renewable energy facilities – to arrive at net zero nirvana- while producing food and developing other resources for well over a billion people? Even assuming they really want to- which I certainly don’t believe.
A lot of the solar and wind are being deployed in inhabited deserts.
Twice nothing, is still nothing.
It’s easy to get what looks like a large increase, from a small base.
But the fact remains that in absolute terms, the amount of coal being added is dozens of times larger than the amount of W&S being added,
W&S still require massive subsidies, while coal and gas pay billions in taxes.
With China official figures, never trust and always verify.
Plus they are building more coal fired power stations…China now has 243 GW of coal-fired capacity currently permitted and under construction.
Comparison 2024 US peak power demand was 745GWhr
So the share of emissions of coal is falling but CO2 is rising? If one looks at the generation Vs emissions and change so the scales match it seems emissions are rising faster than fossil fuel use.
It takes a lot of coal to produce solar panels and it takes a lot of fossil fuels in general to produce, operate, and back up wind and solar power.
The idiots keep promising that China is going green and any day now their coal consumption will plummet. At least one such idiot said that 2023 was the peak for coal in China, fortunately, that idiot was wrong about that as well as the outcome of the U.S. election and that idiot stopped posting here after Trump’s victory.
You know, if you take the Third Graph “Emissions (Mt CO2)” and rescaled the “Y axis” to match the scale presented in the second graph, you’d discover that the rescaled but otherwise unchanged emissions data would EXACTLY OVERLAY the data presented as COAL’s share of generation
Hey Nick, since you are graphing from 2020, lets look at the relative increases.
Wind, 2300 TWh,
Solar, 1517 TWh
COAL 17327 TWh
wind and solar are really “why bother” supplies, aren’t they.
And even since 2010,
COAL electricity increase is still over 2.5 time wind and 3.5 time solar.
Was it your intent to show how pitiful wind and solar electricity supplies are ??
If so, you succeeded. !
ps, Great to see China supporting the world’s plant life, isn’t it !! 🙂 🙂
Perhaps actually to see a presentation that supports their wind and solar equipment export expectations
I think China wants to install a great deal of wind and solar energy in order to build up those industries to such a large scale that they can under price any other company- to push along the net zero scam to weaken the west.
You do know a small increase of a tiny amount is a big percentage
and a big increase of a very large amount is probably a smaller percentage.
Or is maths “difficult” for you to understand?
This is an error that several others make.
I assume Ember is correct, and that coal + other fossil has declined as a percent of generation. However, a couple of points.
All in all I can see no reason to think that either global consumption of coal or global emissions are going to fall in the foreseeable future, and certainly not because of any replacement of generating capacity by wind and solar. On the evidence of what is actually happening, that last is a total fantasy,
Nor can I see any evidence that China either believes in any sort of climate crisis caused by CO2 emissions, or is making any effort to reduce its emissions.
The Western climate lobby needs to get real about the world we are living in. It is one in which no amount of Western wind and solar is going to make any reduction in global emissions.
[Actually, there is no evidence that it will even reduce Western emissions.]
It is one in which no-one outside of a few Western countries believes there is any necessity to reduce emissions, and its one in which the rest of the world sends thousands of people to UN conventions on climate which end, year after year, decade after decade, which end with no commitments to reductions, or none that are implemented by anyone that matters.
While the countries then have a really simple policy: to grow their economies as fast as they can, and let their emissions go wherever that growth takes them.
10 years from now, I think the evidence is that global emissions will be well over 40 billion tons a year. Whether the UK, US and Australia get to net zero or not.
We are like Holland. If the Dutch really believe a climate catastrophe is coming and bringing rising sea levels, there is no point their lowering their emissions. It will have no effect. They need to spend the funds raising the level of the dikes. The West as a whole is in the same position, they too need to stop worrying about their emissions and start taking action to protect their populations from what they claim to believe is the inevitable. [Whether they really do believe is another story….]
There is a weird almost religious train of completely irrational reasoning which the activists seem to employ, starting with the supposed catastrophe and ending with demands for individual western countries to build wind farms and close down oil consumption. Which it is increasingly obvious is impossible, but worse, even if possible, useless. It is not our emissions that are causing the problem, if there is one, and lowering them will do nothing to ameliorate it.
“There is no sign that China is making any effort to reduce either emissions from generation or emissions as a whole.”
China is in a growth phase where electricity demand is rising rapidly. The experience of Western countries is that this won’t go on forever. Then the growing share of W&S will tell.
You are imagining things Nick.
China now have a working modular pebble bed reactor.
Wind and solar will soon be relegated to the scrap heap, where they below.
Until then they continue to build COAL fired power stations rapidly.
The experience of countries like Germany and UK is something China are never going to follow.. they are not that stupid.
Yeah, the share of reliable energy produced by wind and solar is effectively net zero.
Cannot see any sign in the numbers of this happening on any significant scale. And its anyway only generation – the other uses of coal, and the resulting emissions, are not going to be affected.
China’s emissions look like heading north of 15 billion tons in ten years, and coal will probably be well north of 6 billion tons.
Time to accept that the story is not working out. There won’t be a climate catastrophe, the world will not move to wind and solar generation. Not going to happen.
It’ll be a long time before China’s growth in electricity slows down. Most of its population is still peasantry who don’t even own any cars. It’s population will probably slowly decrease but it’s power demand will grow for a long time.
EVs actually make sense in China, they do have some of their own petroleum, but since car and usually used just around cities, with pretty good very high speed rail between cities, there is not the need for long distance workhorse cars and SUV like there is in places like Australia, the USA and most other countries..
Must be nice to view the world with such shiny simplicity
“Simplistic” is the correct definition for Nick.
Well then, if Wind and Solar really are cheaper (and more dependable) than Coal or Gas, why is China building ANYTHING BUT new Wind and Solar?
Especially when they have those millions of Uhygur slaves turning out (b)millions of solar panels yearly without any overhead costs.
Why haven’t China’s Coal emissions been steadily dropping since the 2015 Paris Agreement?
Could it be…oh I don’t know…that Coal is CHEAPER than Wind AND Solar?
Completely irrelevant.
If China was as committed to W&S as you want to believe, then they would be installing more W&S. Instead they fiddle around the edges with so called renewable power but spend almost all their money building coal.
According to the IEA China is responsible for around 80% of the growth in global CO2 emissions over the last decade and is by far the largest emitter in the world even though it has more than 40% of the global installed capacity of wind and solar. It will also surpass the US to become the world’s largest oil market by 2030
IEA ‘World Energy Outlook 2024’ (Oct 2024)
Now is it 1 in 3 tonnes or, per this IEA report ( https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/12/19/iea-coal-outlook-bad-news-for-miliband/ ) closer to 2 in 3…4.9bt/8.77bt is over 55% and far closer to 2/3 than 1/3.
Well done China
Well done India.
The planet needs that CO2. !
gotta steal that image for my endless battles with the forestry community in New England who have become woke in recent years!
feel free. ! 🙂
The supplied graph shows the Eddy cycle peaking every 1000 year, which corresponds to the rate previous warm cycles have occurred. The Bray cycle is show to have exactly the same peaks and lows. Where does 2500 years come from?
Look at the graphs The Bray cycle is in a brownish colour. it has a lower amplitude than than the Eddy cycle(about a third) so it mainly affects the peaks and lows of the Eddy. You can see it causes the warm periods to decrease with time. The MWP is particularly cold because the Bray is in a cooling phase. After 2250 it goes into a warming period which will increase the peaks.
The red one is the composite not the Bray cycle, I had exactly the same problem initially.
When considering solar cycles, Milankovitch cycles, and major oceanic currents and oscillations; the climate alarmist chooses a trace gas to be the culprit! Just WHO exactly is the denier!?
Nick Stokes is a brainwashed leftist cult member who gets off on dominating our comments sections – and is probably pleased by this discussion without even reading the well-reasoned feedback aimed at him.
More effective strategy: IGNORE
I prefer to chop his comments down at every point, so other people can see the actual reality, instead of his twisted biased little attempts
I go with don’t feed the trolls.
Looking at the wider picture the IEA expect world wide coal demand to reach a record high of 8.77bn tonnes in 2024 and electricity production from coal to reach an all time high of 10,700 TWh. Shrinking coal demand in advanced economies has been offset by growth in India, Indonesia and Viet Nam. India is expected to see the largest growth in coal use in coming years and
“as has been the case for the last 25 years China, which consumes 30% more coal than the rest of the world put together will continue to define global trends”
“By 2025 the amount of coal used in the EU and US together will be less than half that used in India”
“Coal market centre of gravity continues to shift to Asia……Indonesian exports expected to surpass 550Mt in 2024……Mongolia has become the second largest supplier of metallurgical coal after Australia, all of it going to China”
“Coal is the primary power source in SE Asia today Of additional electricity generation over the past 20 years 60% has been from coal….. and the region has near 110GW of existing capacity…..Over 50% is less than 10 years old” and over 80% is less than 20 years old”
IEA ‘World Energy Outlook 2024’ (Oct 2024) and ‘Coal 2024 Analysis and forecast to 2027’ (Dec. 2024)
If China consumed an Equal amount of coal to the rest of the world China would consume 50% of annual global production instead of 1 in 3 or 1/3. However, if China is consuming 30% more than 1/2 (50% x .3) then China is consuming 65% of annual global production. Certain IEA reports do not agree with other IEA reports.
Very nice, this Lauri character is an embarrassment, he needs help, lots of help.
Energy transition is a hoax
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/94557/
Global warming of just over 1 deg. C from the increase in the beneficial gas, CO2 has helped rescue our massively greening planet from dangerously low levels of CO2.
Still under 430 ppm and less than half the optimal level for most life on our planet. The current climate, including the additional warmth, as viewed from an objective/authentic, scientific/biological standpoint is a climate OPTIMUM!
Death by GREENING!
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/69258/
Evidently to China, India and the other coal-dependent nations, the alarmists’ warnings of the “catastrophic effects of a warming climate” are much like a broken record, and like a broken record people have stopped listening to it. They are just continuing to utilize whatever works best for their economies, and all that wind and solar are doing to a small degree is supplementing the main power supply, without coming anywhere close to replacing it.