Tag Archives: Anthony Watts

The Fallout From The Iberian Blackout

Posted on by

On Sunday, WattsUpWithThat posted an article about the future of energy transition from fossil fuels to green energy. It’s not looking good.

The article reports:

It’s no secret that the Republican’s “Big Beautiful Bill” plans to axe large swaths of mandates and billions of dollars in subsidies directed at achieving a so-called “energy transition.” If that budget axe falls, it will be the proverbial third strike that puts to rest the idea that the U.S., never mind the world, will abandon fossil fuels. The other two strikes already happened.

Strike two came last month with the Great Iberian blackout. Preliminary forensics make clear that over-enthusiastic deployment of unreliable solar and wind power was the fulcrum that put 55 million people in the dark for days. Few politicians will want to risk allowing something like that to happen again, anywhere. And, as the North American Electric Reliability Corporation keeps warning, blackout risks are rising here, and for the same reason. Reliability used to be the core feature of electric grid designs, before the rush to push an energy transition in service of climate goals.

And strike one came a few weeks prior to the Iberian calamity with the release of a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) titled Energy and AI. That report sought to answer the question about how to reliably meet the surprising jump in power demands expected in the coming decade’s boom in artificial intelligence (AI) data centers. Answering that also answers, even if not intentionally, the same question about meeting society’s future demands.

The article concludes:

This doesn’t mean Big Tech or the IEA are backing off climate pledges. Nor does it mean the climate debate is settled. Nor will we see any diminution in transition fervor from the climate-industrial complex. Likely that fervor heats up as the Trump Administration attempts to deliver on its promise to defund the panoply of climate-energy programs marbled throughout federal agencies.

What it does mean is that whatever one believes about the science of the climate, the fact is that mandates and subsidies can’t change the physics of energy systems. Systems that can deliver reliable power at the scales necessary for robust growth remain anchored in precisely the fuels the transitionists want to abandon.

Fossil fuels are not perfect (although natural gas is close), but they have been the backbone of the world’s economy for generations. It is possible that one day green energy can discover the technology to make it as reliable and inexpensive as fossil fuel, but that has not yet happened. The best way to spur on the green energy research is to get the governments out of it and let the inventors and private investors make a profit.

An Island Is Drowning?

Posted on by

Recently, Anthony Watts at WattsUpWithThat posted an article about the island of Cartí Sugdupu in Panama. The BBC recently posted an article claiming that the island is sinking because of climate change. Evidently, that is not the case.

The article reports:

The BBC’s recent article “Climate change: The Panama community that fled its drowning island,” claims that the island of Cartí Sugdupu in Panama is being swallowed by rising sea levels due to climate change. This is false. The reality is that the island’s inhabitants are not being forced to relocate because of rising oceans, but due to overcrowding, poor infrastructure, and a lack of resources—issues that have nothing to do with climate change. Furthermore, real-world examples and peer-reviewed research contradict the idea that small islands are disappearing due to rising seas. Instead, many islands are growing, adapting, and naturally shifting over time. The BBC’s report is misleading at best, deliberately deceptive at worst.

Cartí Sugdupu is one of Panama’s San Blas Islands, home to the indigenous Guna people. The BBC’s article, painting a picture of climate-induced displacement, completely ignores the fact that the island is severely overcrowded, with more than 1,000 people packed into a tiny space of just 0.028 square miles. That’s a population density higher than New York City! The primary reason the residents are moving is not rising sea levels, but poor living conditions, lack of fresh water, and a shortage of space—issues that have been pressing for decades.

The article concludes:

The real reason for the relocation of Cartí Sugdupu’s residents has nothing to do with climate change. Instead, it comes down to basic infrastructure challenges:

  • Overpopulation – As seen in the head photograph, the island is overcrowded, with nowhere to expand. Unlike coral atolls that naturally grow, Cartí Sugdupu is an isolated, heavily inhabited island with no room for additional housing or development.
  • Lack of Freshwater and Sanitation – Many small islands struggle with freshwater availability. The BBC ignores this and instead attributes all hardships to climate change.
  • Economic and Government Decisions – Panama’s government is relocating the residents as part of a planned move, not an emergency evacuation due to rising waters.

The BBC’s reporting is a prime example of climate alarmism dressed up as journalism, with the organization pushing a narrative, while ignoring crucial facts. Rather than investigating the real reasons behind Cartí Sugdupu’s relocation—overpopulation, lack of infrastructure, and government decisions—the BBC misleadingly claims climate change is forcing its residents to relocate. It is the government that has made that decision, and not because the seas are rising at a historically unusual rate. The BBC ignores peer-reviewed research disproving its claim that islands are disappearing, fails to mention historical sea level trends, and omits crucial local factors that explain the island’s challenges. This isn’t objective reporting—it is activism disguised as news. The BBC’s audience deserves better, it deserves the truth.

Please follow the link to the article. At the top of the article is a picture, I believe, of the island. There isn’t even enough space on that island to breathe! This is another incident where a media outlet has chosen a narrative over actual facts.

About Those Canadian Wildfires…

Posted on by

On Saturday, Anthony Watts posted an article at wattsupwiththat about the Canadian wildfires that have polluted the east coast of America for the past week or so. Mr. Watts explains that not only are the wildfires NOT the result of global warming, but that there were notable wildfires long before the invention of the automobile and the industrialization of America and other countries.

The article includes the following graphs:

The article also notes:

Temperatures in the United States are virtually unchanged from 2005, when a new state-of-the-art climate monitoring system called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) was put in place by NOAA. However, this data is never reported to the news media on NOAA’s climate reports for the United States.

The scientific evidence does not support the theory of global warming. However, there is major economic and political change that can be accomplished by promoting the theory of global warming, so the theory will continue to be promoted.

 

 

How To Create Questionable Numbers

Posted on by

Recently wattsupwiththat posted an article about the new surface station report. Surface stations are the instruments used to measure changes in the earth’s climate. They are what the climate change cabal uses to justify creating havoc in the American economy. The other reference for this article is the actual report.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here are a few pictures that illustrate the problem with some of the devices that are supposed to be tracking temperature change on the earth:

The article at wattsupwiththat states:

For more information, or to speak with the authors of this study please contact Vice President and Director of Communications Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org or call/text 312-731-9364.

This new report is a follow up to a March 2009 study, titled “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” which highlighted a subset of over 1,000 surveyed stations and found 89 percent of stations had heat-bias issues. In April and May 2022, The Heartland Institute’s team of researchers visited many of the same temperature stations as in 2009, plus many not visited before. The new survey sampled 128 NOAA stations, and found the problem of heat-bias has only gotten worse.

“The original 2009 surface stations project demonstrated conclusively that the federal government’s surface temperature monitoring system was broken, with the vast majority of stations not meeting NOAA’s own standards for trustworthiness and quality. Investigations by government watchdogs OIG and GAO confirmed the 2009 report findings,” said H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environment Policy at The Heartland Institute who surveyed NOAA surface stations himself this spring. “This new study is evidence of two things. First, the government is either inept or stubbornly refuses to learn from its mistakes for political reasons. Second, the government’s official temperature record can’t be trusted. It reflects a clear urban heat bias effect, not national temperature trends.”

There are a lot of ways to manipulate numbers to prove a point. A good statistician can actually adjust numbers to prove almost anything. When you locate your climate measuring devices near heat sources, it’s a pretty good bet that you will statistically be able to show that the earth is warming.

In Case You Were Worried About This…

Posted on by

Anthony Watts at wattsupwiththat is reporting today:

A new Policy Brief from The Heartland Institute shows there is no evidence of acceleration in the rise of global sea levels since the 1920s and concludes the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) concerns over this issue is “without merit.”

The Policy Brief, titled “Global Sea Level Rise: An Evaluation of the Data,” authored by Dr. Craig Idso, chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. David Legates, professor of climatology in the Department of Geography at the University of Delaware, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, is taken from a chapter of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, a report fromthe Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

According to IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, “it is very likely that the rate of global mean sea level rise during the 21st century will exceed the rate observed during 1971–2010 for all Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) scenarios due to increases in ocean warming and loss of mass from glaciers and ice sheets.”

However, Idso, Legates, and Singer argue “sea-level rise is a research area that has recently come to be dominated by computer models. Whereas researchers working with datasets built from long-term coastal tide gauges typically report a slow linear rate of sea-level rise, computer modelers assume a significant anthropogenic forcing and tune their models to find or predict an acceleration of the rate of rise.”

…Instead of accelerated sea-level rises, the authors find “the best available data” shows “evidence is lacking for any recent changes in global sea level that lie outside natural variation.” They point out that if the negative effects of the claimed accelerated rise in sea level, such as a loss of surface area, were to be visible anywhere, it would most likely be in the small islands and coral atolls in the Pacific Ocean. However, research indicates many of these islands and atolls are actually increasing in size. Simply, they are “not being inundated by rising seas due to anthropogenic climate change.”

Fears of an accelerated rise in sea levels caused by anthropogenic climate change are misplaced and overblown. Further, this fearmongering should not be used by policymakers in coastal states and cities to advocate for policies that would seek to limit or eliminate carbon dioxide emissions.

No, we are not all going to drown in five years because of sea-level rise. Some politicians are screaming ‘the sky is falling’ because they believe it will get them the votes of young people who are not scientifically schooled. The earth’s climate is cyclical, we are in a cycle. There will be another cycle. We need to do what we can to limit pollution, but in the end, we are not important enough to make a significant difference. Pride is one of the things the fuels the extreme environmental movement.

If You Don’t Like The Data–Change It!

Posted on by

The Daily Caller posted an article yesterday about the latest numbers released (make that changed) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) about temperatures in America’s corn belt last summer.

The article includes two charts–one of the actual temperature data and one of the data after NOAA ‘adjusted’ the numbers:

These are the charts:

Source: NCDC climate data presented by Roy Spencer on www.drroyspencer.com.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

The article reports:

Meteorologist Anthony Watts has also caught NOAA changing the temperature record. For two years, NOAA claimed that July 2012 was the hottest month on record — that is, until it quietly adjusted the data so that July 1936 was the hottest month on record.

“Two years ago during the scorching summer of 2012, July 1936 lost its place on the leaderboard and July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the United States,” Watts wrote. “Now, as if by magic, and according to NOAA’s own data, July 1936 is now the hottest month on record again. The past, present, and future all seems to be ‘adjustable’ in NOAA’s world.”

Generally speaking it is very easy to lie with statistics–you can make them say anything you want them to say. However, it is really easy to lie with statistics when you arbitrarily change the numbers. That seems to be what is going on with NOAA.

The Coming Ice Age

Posted on by

On Friday, Anthony Watts posted the graph below on his WattsUpWithThat website.

“Data adapted from ‘The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum’ by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels ‘The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown’ and ‘The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift’.”

The bottom line here is simple–we are more at risk from global cooling than from global warming. Before we panic, we might also consider that as of yet we haven’t come up with an accurate computer model that correctly predicts long term trends in weather. Weather is the result of all sorts of things–carbon levels, sun spots, ocean temperatures, etc. Even at that, we really don’t know which of these things exerts the greatest influence or how they interact. Generally speaking, we need to do everything we can to keep the planet clean, but we need to balance that effort against the needs of the people who live on earth.

Enhanced by Zemanta