The UK is waking up when it's too late, it is not too late here

As I drove across the causeway that connects my village with the larger town I could see far across the bay to the farmlands that are becoming windfarms. It looked as if they were marching straight into our town of Rockport. We are in an essential flyway for birds, we have whooping cranes and sandhill cranes which are large vulnerable birds. Please do not let them get any closer.

Wind power: Even worse than you thought
But your 'leccy bill will keep going up to buy more of it

A new analysis of wind energy supplied to the UK National Grid in recent years has shown that wind farms produce significantly less electricity than had been thought, and that they cause more problems for the Grid than had been believed.

The report (28-page PDF/944 KB) was commissioned by conservation charity the John Muir Trust and carried out by consulting engineer Stuart Young. It measured electricity actually metered as being delivered to the National Grid.

In general it tends to be assumed that a wind farm will generate an average of 30 per cent of its maximum capacity over time. However the new study shows that this is actually untrue, with the turbines measured by the Grid turning in performances which were significantly worse:

Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.

Predictions: Climate, Populations, etc

This is just a middle portion of a post on PowerLine blog,  You will want to read it all.

In 1980 Ehrlich famously made and lost a bet with Julian Simon based on Ehrlich's predicted scenario of resource scarcity. George Will recalled the bet in a good column on the global warming scare:

Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

Will added a footnote to this history: "An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: 'Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.'" There is much more to the story, making it of current interest, as John Hinderaker noted in "Politicizing science."

One of the things we have learned from Wikileaks concerning Climate Gate

Apparently our state department and CIA were interested in getting the right political solution at the Copenhagen climate meeting.  Those cables have been released and pounced upon by reporters.  This is from Pajamas Media but the first stories about  it came out of the UK's Guardian newspaper.  This is the Pajamas Media summation.

WikiLeaks Cables Confirm Worst Fears of Climate Skeptics
by Charlie Martin
Just a year ago, the Climategate files — a collection of emails, data, and computer source code — were somehow purloined from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit and made public. Pajamas Media was one of the first news organizations to cover them, with the first breaking news story out within hours of their first discovery (“Hacker Releases Data Implicating CRU in Global Warming Fraud“).

The full consequences are not yet clear, but the files’ release probably led to the collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference — to which the Obama administration had committed no little amount of political capital — and certainly contributed to the public’s increasing skepticism about the supposed consensus of climate science.

On December 3rd, the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom published one of a series of stories based on the cables, this one titled “WikiLeaks cables reveal how U.S. manipulated climate accord.” The United States really was applying considerable political and diplomatic pressure on other players; the scientific “consensus” had long since been subsumed by the pressure to score a political win. As the Guardian put it:

Hidden behind the save-the-world rhetoric of the global climate change negotiations lies the mucky realpolitik: money and threats buy political support; spying and cyberwarfare are used to seek out leverage.

The bribes — sorry, I mean promised aid — was no mean amount of money. The Guardian reports amounts in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. The government of the Maldives set their price at $30 million. With a population of roughly 300,000, that is $100 per person in a country where the average household gets by on $450 a year.

This pressure, however, wasn’t limited to financial transactions: the United States was developing intelligence on the other participants in the conferences.

Seeking negotiating chips, the U.S. State Department sent a secret cable on July 31, 2009, seeking human intelligence from UN diplomats across a range of issues, including climate change. The request originated with the CIA. As well as countries’ negotiating positions for Copenhagen, diplomats were asked to provide evidence of UN environmental “treaty circumvention” and deals between nations.

At the same time, foreign powers — most probably at least including the People’s Republic of China — used sophisticated social engineering and cyberwar methods to get leverage in the upcoming negotiations.

There is much more on this, go here.

The Hurricane season that wasn't

Well actually, they were but they didn't come here.  Hurricane season is over, but the Weather Channel hasn't relaxed, they are "on it" for the winter storms. American Thinker has some thoughts on the past season.

Apocalypse Now! (Or Pretty Soon, Anyway)
By Jeffrey Folks

November 30 was the last day of the Atlantic hurricane season. Those with six-month memory spans will recall that back in May, forecasters at NOAA were predicting "an extremely active" hurricane season, with 14 to 23 named storms and three to seven major hurricanes. The mainstream media was quick to enlarge NOAA's predictions, speculating that storm damage would exceed that of 2005, the year of Katrina. The environmental radicals who populate mainstream newsrooms were licking their chops, panting at the chance to broadcast images of storm victims hanging out on rooftops and to link the devastation to climate change.

As it was, nothing happened. Of the nineteen named storms, none struck the U.S. Aside from some isolated damage in a few Caribbean and Central American outposts (and, uncharacteristically, in Newfoundland), none did major damage.

Oh, well -- there's always 2011, and it's not too early to start prognosticating. The year 2011 will undoubtedly be a highly active hurricane season, with a number of powerful storms striking populated stretches of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The devastation will be immense. Maybe we will finally learn our lesson and stop drilling for oil, mining coal, and chopping down trees.

Or maybe, since hurricanes have refused to cooperate, environmental radicals can turn to something else.

The Weather Channel didn't come by their predictions out of the blue,

An article from Science magazine published in September makes the case that human activity is causing the mass extinction of ocean life. Authored by John Alroy of Australia's Macquarie University, the article claims that human activity is responsible for extinction of marine life at a rate many times greater than that of the past. As Alroy puts it (assuming from the start that a "current crisis" exists), "The current global crisis may therefore permanently alter the biosphere's taxonomic composition by changing the rules of evolution."  

Read the rest here.

About the Cancun Convention on AGW or Climate Change as they call it now

The Anchoress has such a way with words.  Today's offering:

Rationing Bono &; Other Gaia-Saving Ideas
Eschewing teleconferences that could reduce their carbon footprints to almost nothing (assuming they all own computers and work in offices appropriately outfitted with vision-wrecking fluorescent overheads), the usual bureaucratic suspects have gathered in Cancun, Mexico, for another round of United Nations’ “talks on climate change”—that malleable and useful crisis upon which every weather variant and geological shift may be blamed without proof, for as long as the scam can dependably line the right pockets, and infringe upon our daily living without discomfiting the elite.

See what I mean about a way with words? I could have said they are down there blathering on again, but would that have had have the impact her words do? No, not at all. She goes on:

These determined negativists, having parked their private jets at the shady end of the tarmac, are currently meeting, eating, greeting, and presenting to a standing choir that needs no persuasion, their increasingly unpersuasive scientific “studies” forecasting the inevitable death of planet Earth.

Oh, I do love the Anchoress. Here's more of her good words on these people about an article she quotes from the Daily Telegraph:

Well, we’re not sure how that sentence was supposed to end, but perhaps goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture will no longer be available to the masses of great unwashed, who—being peasants—shouldn’t really need much more than an icebox, a milk cow, and a cabbage patch, anyway.

She goes on:

Curiously, no one at these conferences ever suggests that less-draconian measures, affecting a relative minority of human beings, might be worth exploring. Beyond canceling their annual exotically-located meet-up in favor of efficient teleconferences, for instance, these people might want to take a good, hard look at the entertainment industry in general, and rock bands in particular.

Uh oh, Bono is going to get it now, read this:

Let them start with U2, the Irish rock band that—even as our put-upon saints in Cancun are weeping over Gaia—has landed its current extravaganza, “The 360 Tour,” in Australia. Billed as the biggest tour ever mounted, and at a daily cost of $850,000, the show requires six 747 jets, 55 trucks, and an assembly crew of 130. “You compare a tour by the number of trucks they use,” production manager Jake Berry said. “The Rolling Stones ran 46 trucks. We are running 55. This is the biggest.”
[....]
That’s a pretty impressive bit of consumption, but let’s add into that the air-conditioning at the indoor venues. Add into it the trains, planes, and automobiles used to transport hundreds of thousands of people to the shows. Add to it the klieg lights used for every televised interview, the trees killed to print every magazine promo and the $30.00 posters sold at all 157 shows. And consider if you will the souvenir teeshirts—possibly stitched together in some hellish Indonesian sweatshop–that weren’t even made out of bamboo fiber!


One wonders: had U2 had not run the ZooTV tour twenty years ago, would the planet be in its very death throes today?
[....]
As we read the dire news out of Cancun, that food and material goods may need to be rationed among the little people, for the good of the earth, we may take comfort in knowing that, before we retire to our cold-water flats, we will still be permitted to expend large amounts of our hard-earned cash for the privilege of being entertained and lectured by extremely wealthy musicians who inveigh against greed and endorse big-government solutions to social and environmental problems, even as they move their assets to tax-reduced locations, and fly their multiple 747’s and drive their scores of trucks to their next profitable, ephemeral gig.

It is a funny sort of global crisis that requires sacrificial amends and rationing—with the accompanying restrictions on earnings and opportunities—from some people, while others are permitted to continue living their lives and making their profits pretty much as they always have.

This is just what I saw as the best part of a very long and intelligent post. Read it all here.

Another "Gee, who knew?" article on the environment

This from the Daily Mail online from the UK.

Environmentalists 'exaggerated' threat to tropical rainforests from global warming
By David Derbyshire
The threat to tropical rainforests from climate change may have been exaggerated by environmentalists, according to a new study.

Researchers have shown that the world's tropical forests thrived in the far distant past when temperatures were 3 to 5C warmer than today.
They believe that a wetter, warmer future may actually boost plants and animals living the tropics.
The findings, published in the respected journal Science, come from a study of pollen trapped in rocks during a natural period of global warming 56.3million years ago.

Science may be getting around to the truth instead of politics.

When it comes to climate, separation of church and state ends

From the Weekly Standard:

The Green Shepherd

The White House wants churches to advance its climate change agenda.

By Meghan Clyne

If the Obama administration has its way, the gospel of climate change will be coming to a pulpit near you. That at least seems to be the dream of the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships—a 25-member group of leaders from across the religious spectrum that is part of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Last month, the council spent a day at the White House briefing senior administration officials on its “final report of recommendations” for improving collaboration between the government and religious organizations. The 164-page document, entitled “A New Era of Partnerships,” takes up the “priority areas” identified by President Obama—Economic Recovery and Domestic Poverty, Fatherhood and Healthy Families, Environment and Climate Change, Global Poverty and Development, and Interreligious Cooperation.

Read the rest, forewarned is forearmed.  When it comes to the National Day of Prayer it is too religious, as is Franklin Graham, but climate now that is the true religion of government of this administration and his cohorts.

What!?? You say Global Warming may not be caused by HUMANS???

I jest, of course.  The earth was warming and cooling a very long time before we came on the scene.  Why ANYONE would think we could change the course of nature is beyond me.  I see that as dipping out the ocean one spoon at a time.  I do agree we should take care of those things we can, no pollution, husband our resources and things like that, but change the course of the earth, no, we can't. Not possible we are not that good. 
What started this rant?  This article from the LA Times: (via Lucianne)

Ice-covered volcanoes may answer climate change questions
Eruptions from mountains such as Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull create rocks that offer scientists clues about global warming.
By Karen Kaplan
Ice-covered volcanoes like the one in Iceland that brought European air traffic to a standstill are the center of an emerging branch of volcano science that seeks to answer important questions about climate change.

Scientists believe the rocks created when volcanoes erupt beneath glaciers contain distinct chemical signatures that indicate the thickness of the ice that was above the volcanoes when they blew. By correlating the thickness with the age of the rocks, researchers can estimate the degree to which Earth was covered by glaciers thousands — or even millions — of years ago. That information is crucial to climatologists who want to understand how ice and temperature conspire to make the globe cool down or heat up. Read the rest.