agit prop,
I don’t have enough information to answer the question about how strong the cycle is, I only started looking into a few months ago when talking a colleague about Egypt and the true age of sphinx came up. The Solar Induced Dark Age is quite an interesting hypothesis.
I was listening to NPR driving the 400 miles back home from my daughter’s house after Christmas and a celebrity environment activist stated how “the world is burning up”. Really? Does this person actually think that such hyperbolic statements lend credibility to the climate change narrative? While at my daughter’s, I happened to find a read a copy of “The Hidden Life of Trees”, which, by the way, is a wonderful book. It underscored to me how we often think we know something but really don’t [know] at all. There was a passage describing how pine trees 14,000 years ago survived a 42 deg. climb in temperature and then a 42 deg. drop in temperature, all in the span of only 30 years. This was obviously pre-industrial. No anthropogenic climate change here. And somehow, life went on and we’re still here, both man and pine trees.
People talk about how the overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence shows that man is causing climate change. Yet, in my own field, time and time again I’ve seen how an overwhelming preponderance of scientific evidence suddenly gets proven wrong. And almost always, there was money and/or power and/or social pressure driving the generation and proliferation of scientific evidence for an agenda that served the few but recruited the many to back their view (even though it usually wound up working against the many).
Isn’t it funny how carbon is such a huge problem? Yet in our state, in communities under a certain size, they allow burning of leaves and brush. Really? And first responder and government vehicles will sit there idling for hours. Really? And the elite fly in their private jets and cruise in their private yachts all over the world but the rest of us are supposed to scale down our standard of living. Really? And our government wages war all over the globe that generates carbon release like nothing else but that’s OK. Really? And TPTB allow and I daresay promote the rampant production of cheap, shoddy, new and improved(?) goods with very limited life spans so you keep having to buy new stuff to replace the old stuff which is lasting shorter and shorter periods of time and becoming harder and harder to fix, all of which takes more and more carbon to create. Really? Almost every government official and government agency is screaming about climate change but how many of them are encouraging society away from being a wasteful, throwaway culture? Next to none. Virtually everything that you are brainwashed about by government and corporate entities is to make you more reliant and dependent. Heaven forbid you should be self-reliant and independent. Can’t have that among the proles. And the proles fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. Feed me, take care of me, help me, gimme free stuff. Interesting, isn’t it?
I just wonder who came up with the name, “climate change”. To me, it’s an incredibly stupid name so I’m opposed to using it and thereby validating it. What CAN’T be lumped under that name? Virtually nothing! Too cold? Climate change! Too hot? Climate change! Too wet? Climate change! Too dry? Climate change! Well, it’s the variability and extremes you say. So who determines what’s too variable and too extreme for such and such location? How non-variable and non-extreme should it be. I wonder if the problem is really climate change. I personally think the problem is pollution. Frankly, I think “pollution crisis” is a better phrase to describe our troubles. Our planet is being damaged in a multitude of ways from a plethora of pollutants but somehow, the one that can be used to the greatest benefit by an elite to amass wealth and power and to control a population is carbon. Hmm … Isn’t that an odd coincidence?
Chris says that energy is the master resource and that thesis certainly seems well founded to me. And the source of most of our energy on the planet is carbon in one form or another. Tighten your controls over the production, distribution, and utilization of carbon and tax its consumption and it’s hard to imagine anything that will give you more wealth, power, and control. Tyrants have known for millennia that if you control the food supply, you control the people. But food is only one source of carbon. Broaden that control to all the different forms of carbon that produce energy (whether food, oil, coal, natural gas, etc.) and you have the people by their short hairs. And get them all to agree to it (which is usually pretty easy to do when ovine thinking predominates in our world). It’s the perfect scheme.
Let’s say we instantaneously go to zero carbon tomorrow. We’re still left with the vast majority of environmental problems we presently have. So now what?
So put me in Dave Collum’s boat. I think he did a phenomenal job of presenting a number of facts that raise valid questions about the climate change issue. You don’t have to know the scientific literature in an area backwards and forward to smell a rat.
Son #2 called last week and asked if I read David Collum’s year end review. He has a PhD in aerospace engineering and works in R&D in the wind industry. I asked him if this passes the sniff test:
He said his gut said no and sent me this today:
In 2006, turbine manufacturer Vestas studied the carbon payback period for various turbines. This took into account extraction and manufacturing of raw materials, production of the turbines, their transport, erection, operation, maintenance, dismantling and disposal, and the same for their foundation and the transmission grid. The figure was between seven and nine months, depending on the type of turbine. Other analyses have come up with similar figures.https://www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg24332461-400-what-is-the-carbon-payback-period-for-a-wind-turbine/
“Nobody on the planet—not one person—knows what will happen to the World’s climate and ecosystem 50 years from now. We are all guessing, some more than others.” ~ MeIf I understand Mr. Collum's climate change analysis correctly, we should only be worrying about greedy banks and power hungry politicians? We don't really know the consequences of putting more pressure on the environment. Therefore, we shouldn't be concerned. We should pay close attention to financial trends, but climate trends are a fraud and a hoax. A few random comments: 1. CO2 is good for trees but it's important the trees don't get too dry or they catch on fire. 2. Belching cows and pigs are why if they were a republic they'd rank third in greenhouse gas emissions. 3. The analysis in terms of money omitted cost. The last ten years were landmark decade of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters:
The 14 separate U.S. billion-dollar disasters in 2019 represent the fourth highest total number of events (tied with 2018), following the years 2017 (16), 2011 (16) and 2016 (15). The most recent years of 2019, 2018 and 2017 have each produced more than a dozen billion-dollar disasters to impact the United States—totaling 44 events. This makes a 3-year average of 14.6 billion-dollar disaster events, well above the inflation-adjusted average of 6.5 events per year (1980-2019). On a slightly longer timeframe, the U.S. has experienced 69 separate billion-dollar disaster events over the last 5 years (2015-2019), an inflation-adjusted average of 13.8 events per year. Over the last 40 years (1980-2019), the years with 10 or more separate billion-dollar disaster events include 1998, 2008, 2011-2012, and 2015-2019."The month-by-month accumulation of billion dollar disasters for each year on record."
This took all of 3 minutes to find- the quote is not complete and presented as if it is. The actual point made is that it depends on SITE- with a low wind site you’ll never get payback was the point made. Duh. with a good site the payback in EROI can be as little as three years. Being in Kansas we don’t lack for wind…
Thomas Homer-Dixon responds
After seeing many versions of the quote on social media, Homer-Dixon responded in 2018 with a blog post labelling it “fraudulent”. “I didn’t write the text, the text itself is selectively quoted, and the argument it makes, taken in isolation, is meaningless,” he wrote. “This text is selectively excerpted from a chapter written by David Hughes in Carbon Shift (2009), a book I co-edited.” He concludes: “So, 1) I didn’t write the text, 2) the text itself is selectively quoted, and 3) the argument it makes, taken in isolation, is meaningless. Three strikes.”Did you adjust data for the phenomenon of building more and more in flood zones, in fire alleys, and on unstable mountain sides?
Don’t trust numbers provided by the manufacturer as they have an incentive to massage numbers to increase sales.
Don’t trust numbers provided by the manufacturer as they have an incentive to massage numbers to increase sales.That's usually the case. But here specifically there are two entirely different numbers being "debated." Let's clean it up. One set is asking about the "energy payback" and the other is a "carbon payback" whatever that is. I don't trust either number presented to be honest. My gut tells me that on strict energy in/out terms that windmills are net positives. On a more realistic basis, I am not so sure because we don't have a single example yet of the energy from windmills being used to entire build new windmills. I'd be willing to bet that on that basis windmills are barely positive at all. Currently. For example, the gigantic fiberglass and epoxy blades...those alone can be 0% manufactured using windmill output. There are exactly zero electrically operated epoxy plants. Also zero fiberglass plants. So the blades cannot be made at all. Not a single one. To do so would require a huge amount of supply chain reconfiguration which would be immensely energy expensive. Can epoxies be made out of organic (non-petroleum) feedstocks? Not yet, not at scale at any rate. What about the components that would have to go into building and maintaining a new organic-based epoxy plant? How many of those can be made using only windmill generated electric output? 1%? Less? And so on.
So a back of the envelope can be done just using money. How long will it take a well-sited wind turbine to make back its total cost of production & installation? If it needs a subsidy, that’s a bad sign. If it can generate enough electricity in 3 years to pay itself off, well, that’s a strong hint it is EROEI positive, because it is having to compete with coal and natgas generation which we know are EROEI positive systems. Well, except for shale gas…which appears heavily subsidized at the moment…
I’m not sure we need to be so strict in our analysis: requiring windmill power to construct each and every one of its components from windmill energy is too strict. If electric power replaces much of transport fuel, then the declining crude output can be redirected away from transport to windmill construction, among other things. File that under the heading of, “we will never run out of oil, but the declining output may need to be rationed to critical industries.”
Such as the windmill construction industry, for instance.
That one change could buy you another 30 years.
I’ve witnessed building in flood zones where some officials palms’ were obviously greased to allow what shouldn’t have been allowed. And buyers bought in those areas even though they were warned repeatedly. And now they have flooding … repeatedly. Plus, more and more building with associated paving causes more and more water run-off and more and more flooding. Ditto with the associated deforestation in these areas where trees would have previously absorbed moisture, stabilized the soil, etc. but now are gone and can’t fulfil those roles. Plus, population densities in general have risen, meaning if any catastrophe hits any area, there are greater repercussions. Plus, lots of crappy building has been allowed. I’ve seen newer houses lose siding or their roofs or collapse altogether in response to such catastrophes as hurricanes when older, better built structures were undamaged or survived.
This analysis reviews and synthesizes the literature on the net energy return for electric power generation by wind turbines. Energy return on investment (EROI) is the ratio of energy delivered to energy costs. We examine 119 wind turbines from 50 different analyses, ranging in publication date from 1977 to 2007. We extend on previous work by including additional and more recent analyses, distinguishing between important assumptions about system boundaries and methodological approaches, and viewing the EROI as function of power rating. Our survey shows an average EROI for all studies (operational and conceptual) of 25.2 (n = 114; std. dev = 22.3). The average EROI for just the operational studies is 19.8 (n = 60; std. dev = 13.7). This places wind in a favorable position relative to fossil fuels, nuclear, and solar power generation technologies in terms of EROI.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222703134_Meta-Analysis_of_Net_Energy_Return_for_Wind_Power_Systems
I would agree that wind power has a relatively high energy return. They do have two big issues, though. The first is that in order to operate a grid with lots of wind power, their intermittency requires storage and a much more complex grid setup and operations. The second and bigger one is that they are limited by the available energy which is ultimately either 1) the downward flux of momentum from the middle and upper atmosphere where it is generated by strong pressure gradients; and 2) smaller scale wind circulations driven by thermal gradients in the lower atmosphere. I don’t have time to search right now, but research suggests that we will hit saturation well before we’ve replaced all of our current energy use with wind.
Quercus bicolor wrote: I would agree that wind power has a relatively high energy return. They do have two big issues, though. The first is that in order to operate a grid with lots of wind power, their intermittency requires storage and a much more complex grid setup and operations. The second and bigger one is that they are limited by the available energy which is ultimately either 1) the downward flux of momentum from the middle and upper atmosphere where it is generated by strong pressure gradients; and 2) smaller scale wind circulations driven by thermal gradients in the lower atmosphere. I don’t have time to search right now, but research suggests that we will hit saturation well before we’ve replaced all of our current energy use with wind.Qb, Thanks for that link. It was a short and understandable synopsis of the issues with wind power availability. Although he made some big assumptions, his conclusion that wind power will top out at ~6% of global electricity supply feels right. Gail Tverberg https://ourfiniteworld.com/ notes many problems with intermittent electricity. As you noted, "it requires a much more complex grid setup and operations." Gail Tverberg's opinion is that the grid can only operate efficiently with no more than very low double digit percentage of intermittent power. Why? Stable sources need to be available for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. When the wind blows and the sun shines, those stable sources become momentarily redundant. Since electricity has to be consumed the moment it is generated, and those redundant systems can't ramp up/down instantaneously, some of the stable standby power needs to be wasted to ensure that enough continuous power is available for consumers. The holy grail of intermittent power generation is battery storage. I keep looking for scalable systems that will store and release massive amounts of energy as needed. Once that happens, intermittency issues essentially disappear. Until that happens, intermittent power sources are more like toys ... when tools are needed. I watched a Ted Talk with Donald Sadoway several years ago. He was talking about a liquid metal battery system that theoretically could be scaled up to the size of a semi truck trailer. He's formed a company with one of his graduate students: https://ambri.com/ Here's how his battery works:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/aalsin/2018/08/24/qa-mit-professor-donald-sadoway-on-the-future-of-battery-storage-and-renewable-energies/#571ce362c620 The liquid metal battery operates because it's got electrodes made of liquid metal as opposed to lithium-ion, which has electrodes that are made of solid. Classical batteries have typically solid electrodes and a liquid electrolyte. In our case, we have both liquid electrodes and a molten salt, which is also a liquid electrolyte. The way the battery operates is that there’s density differences, and one of the metals is high density and it lies on the bottom of the cell, and then above that is the molten salt which is the electrolyte. And then on top of the molten salt lies a low density liquid metal... The three layers just self segregate, kind of like oil and vinegar. So that's that's the basic premise behind it, and at MIT we've invented a plurality of chemistries that can serve as the electrode choice for the top layer and the electrode choice for the bottom layer.As far as I know, the system is about 75% efficient (same as an Edison battery.) The inefficiency generates the heat that keeps the components molten. It didn't look like anything significant was happening for years. In September, 2019, they announced a deal with NEC. That tells me that progress is being made; however, lots more progress needs to be accomplished before it will be ready for prime time. Grover [Full Disclosure: I have absolutely zero financial interest in this company. I just find the technology promising and hope it (or some other system) can help wean us off of fossil fuels before it's too late.]
One more disagreement and one place where we’re mostly in agreement.
- Once your analysis was complete you decided to go after Greta Thunberg and her “pedophrasty handlers.” Please leave her and your ideas about pedophrasty alone. She’ll grow up and free from her handlers play in the snow when climate change turns out to be a hoax. Or her opinion about 50 years from now turns out to be the truth. Either way, kids everywhere should have a voice. It’s their future, not ours.
- Regarding:
Overpopulation and other pressing issues. I believe we are polluting the planet and rapidly strip mining it of critical resources. For this debate, however, do not conflate the human-driven consumption and destruction of the Earth’s resources with the specific issue of climate change. We are consuming limited resources, dumping plastics into the oceans, and spewing goo into the air and waterways. We really should stop. The Great Pacific Garbage patch is comprised of recycled yogurt containers from the US sent to China.The list of critical environment issues is long: depletion of fresh water aquifers, plastic garbage everywhere including in human poop, smog, the accelerating extinction of plants and animals (possibly we're at the beginning of a 6th extinction), human over-population, and toxic metals dumped into the air and ground. These issues are all symptoms of the current Anthropocene epoch. Climate change is one more symptom. We don't need to argue about how bad climate change will be. We do need a holistic approach to address the cause of all these issues.
Did you adjust data for the phenomenon of building more and more in flood zones, in fire alleys, and on unstable mountain sides?It's not my data to adjust. The data is from the NOAA Climate.gov site. My understanding is that building and paving over wet lands and building in forests prone to fire are what is driving an increase in multi-billion dollar weather and climate-related disasters year over year. We agree on this point. The second point though is that forests are incrementally more prone to fire and former wetlands more prone to flooding because of climate change. [Edit] I apologize that I missed the chart Mr. Collum presented that shows US disaster "hazard" losses from 1980 to 2016 as a percentage of US GDP:
From the chart, 2005 was a very expensive year. That year four hurricanes hit the US, Katrina, Emily, Wilma, and Rita. The GDP was at 3.51 % in 2005. I'm curious what the years since 2016 look like, especially 2017 and 2018. In 2017, hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria hit the US and Puerto Rico. It was the costliest hurricane season on record, costing 294.92 Billion dollars (from Wikipedia). The US GDP was 2.22 % in 2017. In 2018, the California fires cost 400 billion dollars, another record. The GDP was 2.86 % in 2018. Hazard losses will probably be trending upward even when normalized by GDP, unless the GDP starts taking off.