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At least nine dead in the North East of the US after a savage storm dubbed “Riley”. Nearly 2 million people are without power. Airlines canceled more than 3,000 flights.  Waves hitting the shore in Scituate, Massachusetts. Photo from @BrynnCNN Friday afternoon’s high tide in Boston was the third-highest observed tide on record, according to the National Weather Service. March Brings the Most Variety of Extreme Weather in the U.S.Jon Erdman argues that March in the US is notorious for storms due to jet streams and a mix of warmer humid air paired with cold winter air. His impressive list of previous March extreme weather is a good antidote to the “Climate Change” claims coming in 3, 2, 1 …. The deadliest March snowstorm was the infamous Blizzard of 1888, which dumped 40 to 60 inches of snow in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, wind-whipped into drifts which topped some homes. Four hundred were killed in the storm and its cold aftermath. Here are a sampling of other notable March snowstorms:
Here are some other notable severe weather and tornado events in March:
Best wishes for those in the path of weather like this in the North Eastern US and in Europe too. PS: I’m looking for jet-stream predictions from the IPCC and climate models — especially old forgotten ones.  “…a central cell of the Climate-denial Machine” In the climate debate, few men are more central, more loathed and feared than Marc Morano. In the flesh, few men are more warm, witty and polished — an absolute gentleman and a delight to be around. He’s so effective he’s been rated one of the top 17 “planet killers”, and according to the Daily Kos, “Evil Personified”. Thank goodness he’s on our side. Not surprisingly, with so much going for him, he was the villain of the Merchants of Doubt documentary. Newsweek called him “King of the Skeptics” and Esquire Magazine devoted six thousand words to trying to unpack and investigate his key role in climate politics. For a few years Morano worked for Senator Inhofe, who at the time was virtually the only Republican standing up to the media, academia and the UN on climate change. When Leonardo DiCaprio and National Geographic released their top ten list of climate deniers, Inhofe was number one, and Morano, number two. Finally the man behind all this and Climate Depot — who is probably the closest to politics without being a politician — has written The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. Like a bullet it is now the #1 New Release in Environmental Science books. Let’s help keep it there. Right now, Leonardo’s worst fear is that you will buy this book and give it to people on the fence, impressionable teens, and any decent, deplorable teachers. Ask your local library to get a copy.  Click for the link to the Kindle Version
From the great Richard Lindzen: With his book “Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change”, Marc Morano vies to be the Thomas Paine of the movement to save the world from the tyranny of climate catastrophists. He exposes the seemingly infinite number of absurd claims, and the almost unbounded hypocrisy and venality of the proponents of this clearly inhuman and scientifically implausible attempt to control mankind by controlling and, more importantly, restricting access to energy. This book is an unrelenting polemic of the best kind. — Emeritus MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen The book has been endorsed by Nobel Prize Winning scientist Dr. Ivar Giaever. (see below) Rush Limbaugh praised Climate Depot’s Morano in 2009: “Morano’s probably single-handedly, in a civilian sense, the guy (other than me, of course) doing a better job of ringing the bells alarming people of what’s going on here.” – November 20, 2009 This book is the ultimate reference guide to climate change and no parent should be without a copy as their kids under climate education at school from elementary through college!  Marc talks to Andrew Bolt, July 2017 The Weather Channel Founder, the late, great John Coleman, Anthony Watts, and many others praised Morano’s new book. “…today anybody who defies the prevailing “climate change” scare puts his career and his reputation into extreme danger. That is where we find Marc. He is living life behind the eight ball. He has been there for decades. But whatever you may hear from his enemies in the climate change establishment, he is no crazy denier or shill for Big Oil. The explanation is simple. He is so certain of his data that he is quite comfy there… This book is exactly what parents need to counter the indoctrination our children are now being subjected to… Read this book and Marc will become your hero.” — John Coleman.  Marc discovers he is Wanted in Paris, 2015 The book synopsis: Less freedom. More regulation. Higher costs. Make no mistake: those are the surefire consequences of the modern global warming campaign waged by political and cultural elites, who have long ago abandoned fact-based science for dramatic fearmongering in order to push increased central planning. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change gives a voice — backed by statistics, real-life stories, and incontrovertible evidence — to the millions of “deplorable” Americans skeptical about the multibillion dollar “climate change” complex, whose claims have time and time again been proven wrong. The new book is also available at:
The Washington Post reports on the Russian Troll Farm in St Petersburg known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA): Russian trolls used Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to inflame U.S. political debate over energy policy and climate change… The committee’s report found that between 2015 and 2017, more than 9,000 posts and tweets dealt with U.S. energy policy produced by 4,334 Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts controlled by the Internet Research Agency. Twitter told the committee that more than 4 percent of tweets produced by the Russians dealt with energy and climate issues.  … Keep your eye on the numbers — 96% of their effort was not about energy and climate, and presumably we’re talking about 400 posts and tweets? Drop in the ocean… But for those who havent read about the Russian Troll Farm known at the IRA — it’s worth catching up. I found this account from an insider, last October, interesting: Max says that IRA staff were tasked with monitoring tens of thousands of comments on major U.S. media outlets, in order to grasp the general trends of American Internet users. Once employees got a sense of what Americans naturally discussed in comment forums and on social media, their job was to incite them further and try to “rock the boat.” When the U.S. presidential race was just starting, the IRA supposedly conducted classes on which of the early candidates were best for Russian interests. Max says the IRA even maintained a “secret department” that sent staff to the United States for certain undisclosed tasks. Max says the international desk had about 200 employees, each earning 50,000 rubles ($870) a month. Staff would work two days, then have two days off, before repeating the schedule. People worked 12-hour shifts, he says. But in the last 70 years could anyone name a year when there was no Russian effort to covertly undermine US leaders or institutions via propaganda? Isn’t this business as usual, but via VPN? The Russians were true trolls. The main agenda was polarisation, inflammation, doubt:The trolls worked both sides of the fence on many topics. You might think (it’s obvious) that it would suit Russians very well for the West to be fooled into giving up coal and nukes and handicap themselves with sacrificial windmills and solar panels. For sure, but the bigger goal here is to foment division, dissent and distrust. In a high trust society — losing trust in our government, our election process, and our markets eats away at the things that make us great, like acid. And it becomes self fulfilling. Once enough people assume the other players are acting in an untrustworthy manner (even if they are not) the good people tend to adopt the self-serving behaviours they imagine others are adopting. In January 2017, a report from the U.S. intelligence community said Russian president Vladimir Putin had “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” The goals, the analysis revealed, were to undermine faith in U.S. democracy and harm the “potential presidency” of rival candidate Clinton. Remembering that in Jan 2016, almost no one in the US outside of Donald Trump and Scott Adams thought Trump was going to win. So being anti-Hillary was not to be pro-Trump, it was anti-the-next-likely-POTUS. The real goal it appears, was to undermine US confidence in itself, and undermine the ability of the next leader to get things done. Big-government fans at Grist don’t know what to make of it.“Russian trolls shared some truly terrible climate change memes” Terrible, I tell you! Or not…  … This wouldn’t have been my first choice for “terror”. But it might win a primary school art contest. This one is much better:
Grist author, Kate Yoder, totally misses the point: “And here are two anti-environmental memes that highlight the apparent beauty of tar-sands oil.” Or maybe they highlight the ugliness of electric cars and (above) environmental activists? But seriously, 9,000 likes and 250 comments? It’s a great tweet, but in a great nation, how much damage can it do? (Not as much as George Soros.) The news that there are fake “activists” on both sides of the debate is far more threatening to the believers. Skeptics know why we are skeptics. Believers are following a group, so it’s much more unnerving to find that some members of the herd are there to guide the pack.
The Guardian is covering the current Red Alert version of the Great British Snap Freeze UK weather: Met office issues new red warning as wind and snow cause chaos – live Having prepared so well for shorter winters, the National Grid in the UK warns that they may be running out of gas. Hundreds are trapped on the M80 in cars and trucks between Glasgow and Stirling. Seventeen hours and counting… But what about those UK vines and cacti?Tony Heller reminds us that 10-15 years ago scientists were predicting that Drought may be the new norm, and that Climate Change may turn UK Mediterranean. Plant experts were telling Brits that passionfruit and cacti will “thrive in warmer climates”. They even painted what it will look like:  Future British Garden Look out for those “milder, wetter UK winters“:A 2C rise – which some climate scientists say is inevitable by the end of the century – would see the South East of England experiencing conditions similar to south west France, while a 4C rise would expose gardens to conditions seen in south-west Portugal, the Trust said. Herbaceous borders and water-loving English country garden plants from foxgloves to delphiniums could struggle in hotter drier summers, while milder, wetter winters could threaten spring bulbs such as tulips and hyacinths. But plants from hotter climates such as passion flowers and cacti will thrive in warmer temperatures. These of course are just predictions by mere plant experts, not climate scientists — who always knew that extreme snow was coming, but didn’t think to mention it to their plant science colleagues: Mike Calnan, the National Trust’s head of gardens and parks, said the predictions were based on computer models generated by the Met Office Hadley Centre. Oh. No wonder the punters are confused. The Guardian now has to do articles to help them make sense of the snow: Q&A: What does all this snow mean for climate change?Q: Snow in winter. That feels reassuringly normal. Does this mean the climate has fixed itself? Who but a Global Warming Devotee would describe extreme red alert snow dumps as “reassuringly normal”? There are 60 million people in the UK — how many of them are asking “Has the climate fixed itself”? How about “three” and they all work at The Guardian. Having served up a hand-ball Dorothy-dixer, the answer converts calm to impending panic: A: Unfortunately not. In fact, many scientists are concerned this is a prelude to more extreme and less predictable weather. Perhaps those scientists could’ve told the Brits they’d need more gas instead of solar panels? Best wishes to all our British and EU friends faced with too much “global warming”. In South Australia, when the lights went out, Olympic Dam took two entire weeks to get operational again. Spare a thought for those in Puerto Rico. Right now, five months later, and one in 6 still don’t have electricity. That’s five full months of blackout — surviving off candles, car batteries, small diesels and whatever anyone can get. Some people will be waiting til May. Though that’s “95%” connected, so still no joy or lights, for one in 20 people. How do you put a roof back on your house when you can’t even power up your drill? (See The Atlantics photo montage from January 27th to get some idea of what life is like, months after the storm). Puerto Rico has 3.6 million people, was poor and corrupt, with failing infrastructure and huge debts before Hurricane Maria hit on Sept 20th. The government has a budget of $10b per year, but owes more than $70b. The hurricane wiped out 80% of the infrastructure, completely trashing some of the solar and wind “farms”, and bringing down transmission lines. The remains of one solar plant:  … See the complete destruction here: Brett Adair with Live Storms Media One wind farm that survived the hurricane sat idle for weeks because there was no grid running and a wind farm can’t start a grid up (so much for microgrid resilience). Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, or PREPA had oil powered generation plants which were 44 years old on average, and not surprisingly (with no access to coal or nuclear power) the people paid very high electricity rates. Government entities and a few chosen private industries got it for free though.  Puerto Rico in the Caribbean was right in the path.
The renewables industry are leaping in to sell a vision that the mostly diesel and gas powered state should rebuild and go renewable. Elon Musk is promising to rescue the territory with tesla powerwalls and microgrids. At least some engineers were pointing out the nation needs something cheap, and soon, rather than expensive and fragile. (Check out their photo of the solar panel damage). How exactly is an island in a hurricane zone going to be more resilient with acres of glass, or giant fans on pylons? A lot of the solar farms took a lot of damage. Dakota Smith has before and after images from NOAA maps. One windfarm survived unscathed but was still useless:Vox, Oct 23rd, 2017 There also isn’t any noise. The turbines are in perfect working order and could be a vital source of energy for the power-starved island. Except that they can’t actually be turned on without a small amount of electricity from the grid — which, of course, isn’t currently capable of providing it. When the grid eventually comes back online, the wind farm will be able to provide power to about 35,000 homes. Until then, the blades aren’t turning. The island’s grid is antiquated and hasn’t received any major upgrades in years. Power outages were a regular part of daily life on the island even before the storm Puerto Rico had given away free electricity for years , and was an accident waiting to happen:It’s worth reading Marji Wojcik in full: …when the hurricane made landfall on September 20th, Puerto Rico was already an accident waiting to happen. Unfortunately, like so many of our ailing cities – run by Democrats for decades – it was a victim of irresponsible progressive policies long before it was a victim of Maria. The government has funneled public money to state-owned enterprises that are supposed to be financially independent. Worse, the report said, many workers no longer even look for jobs, since welfare benefits pay more than actual work. A year and a half ago, even the New York Times had to admit ~ How Free Electricity Helped Dig $9 Billion Hole in Puerto Rico ~
This is what a government run monopoly grid can achieve:A 2016 report on PREPA commissioned by the Puerto Rican government is scathing. In the latter months of that year, for example, Puerto Ricans experienced four to five times the number of service outages as U.S. customers on average, though they pay the second-highest rates in the U.S. after Hawaii. Instead of investing in preventive maintenance, PREPA operates in a permanent state of triage. Its budget is “opaque and discretionary.” Record keeping is “subpar.” A third of the capital budget is spend on discretionary administrative expenses, hinting at a slush fund. Thirty percent of PREPA’s employees have retired or migrated to the mainland since 2012, the Washington Post reports—especially its skilled workers. Money is short, the report concludes, but so is human and intellectual capital. The EIA data on Puerto-Rico shows it is a fossil fueled nation: In 2016, 47% of Puerto Rico’s electricity came from petroleum, 34% from natural gas, 17% from coal, and 2% from renewable energy. If renewables were cheap and competitive everyone would be happy. But they can’t even beat expensive diesel gens in an equatorial country. Apparently even two days ago, there were still scenes like this!
h/t RK, pat, yarpos, Hank Phillips, Richard Illfield, TdeF. … The Beast From The East is comingSiberian winds are blowing across Europe, just as the IPCC didn’t predict. In Rome, it’s snowing for the first time in six years, the Air Force is ‘helicoptering over the city, looking for isolated people. Naples got the heaviest snow in 50 years. Schools are closed and people are skiing down the streets. The UK is expecting heavy snow and a wind chill of minus 15C. The snow has already caused more than 200 trains to be cancelled. Roads and hundreds of schools are closed. If we could only install enough windmills we could stop this. Still, it could be worse. “During the Great Frost of 1683–84, the worst frost recorded in England the Thames was completely frozen for two months, with the ice reaching a thickness of 11 inches (28 cm) in London”. — Wikipedia  Thames Frost Fair 1683-84, Painting by Thomas Wyke scan from FT magazine. @ITVLorraine Tweets:
@PunctureSafe-NE Tweets: 2 feet of snow expected
In Europe we’re awaiting the Beast, — Ruairi Reply
h/t Pat, Dave B, Robert R, Environmental Skeptic. … Yet again, we have to ask: does the Bureau of Meteorology care about Australia’s long term climate trend? Are they even trying? Bourke could be one of the top ten most influential temperature sites in the world, mostly by virtue of being miles from anywhere, and used to homogenize a large slab of the land mass of Australia. Bill Johnston documents how changes to the site create most of the temperature trend. The Bureau of Meteorology’s fancy magical and secret homogenization protocol does not detect changes that obviously affect the temperature (like the clearing in the photo below). But sometimes the BoM make “corrections” because of site changes that don’t appear to have mattered. Is it conveniently selective or just inept? The BoM don’t even document major site changes a lot of the time. Even iconic sites that affect huge areas are badly managed. Someone got the tractor and plough and cleared the vegetation. As usual, a citizen scientist, a volunteer, documents it (along with a suite of other site changes).  In the last ten years land was cleared around the thermometer. This denuded area has a lower humidity, and higher volatility of temperatures. The data from this thermometer may be used to “correct” thermometers 1,400 km away.  Bourke Australia, Satellite view. “Back of Bourke”. The town is the last outpost of civilization, so infamous it has it’s own cliche: “The back of Bourke”. If there was a perfect thermometer in Australia, this place would vie for the top spot with records going back to 1871, on the crossroads to nowhere and one of the last almost untouched towns –historic, but not urbanized enmasse. And it is an official ACORN site, considered one of the best quality records in Australia. Bourke is at the crossroads to Australia’s outback and is one of the last almost untouched towns –historic, but not urbanized enmasse. But thanks to Bill Johnston, we now know that even out here the long hand of incompetence and bias has romped through the data. Again, Bill documents a site that has been watered, moved, gone electronic, had a new screen, shifted to the airport, and then just in the last few peak years — as climate change became “life or death” — someone cleared the ground all around it and no one at the BOM noticed. In a Bermuda-triangly type mystery, the station went “electric” but instead of getting better data, for a few years the temperature was only recorded in whole rounded integers. (So much for the tenth of a degree of accuracy, eh?) Plus two or three weeks of data went missing each year, and the site failed performance checks twice. The wonderbar Technical Advisory Forum set up to boost confidence in the expertise of the BoM didn’t investigate this in 2015. Being consistently irrelevant, they also didn’t investigate in 2016 or 2017 either. What looks like a whitewash, smells like a whitewash… Likewise, two-rounds of expert peer-review fail to address such obvious problems in the Bureau’s homogenisation methods? Bourke is so hot it was the place they sent trains to in 1896 to rescue people from a monster heatwave. Bourke is used to homogenise stations like Alice Springs which is 1,400km (860 miles) away. Does this little clearing “heat” a million square kilometers of records? It’s possible. As usual, Johnston’s short post here is backed up by a longer PDF file which outlines his detailed years of research. One Nation’s Senator Brian Burston is presenting this information and the paper to the Senate Estimates on Monday morning. Questions need to be answered. — Jo
_________________________________________Welcome to the back of Bourke where they make the weather warmerA science post by Dr. Bill Johnston[1]. Main points
IntroductionBourke in northwestern New South Wales is synonymous with ‘the bush’; Clancy of the overflow; crows flying backwards to keep dust out of their eyes and mozzies big as chooks…. While caravans and mobile-vans roll-in during winter when its cool and dry they stay away in droves in summer. Rainfall is a low 336 mm/yr; the driest was 86 mm in 2002 and the wettest, 854 mm in 1950. Runs-of-months with zero rain are common and the drier it is the hotter it gets. Irrigation along the Darling River and dryland grazing of cattle, sheep and goats (and tourism) supports the town’s 2,000 people. The history of the placeStarting in 1871 Bourke ranks with Sydney Observatory (from 1859), Melbourne (1856), Perth Observatory (1897), Hobart (1882) and some lighthouses (Cape Otway (1865), Yamba Pilot Station (1877) and Nobbys Head (1867)) as one of the longest continuous weather records in Australia and one of the longer datasets in the Southern Hemisphere. It is also one of 104 non-urban ACORN-SAT sites (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature) used to calculate Australia’s warming. Site and instrument changes effect measurements. The environment surrounding the site has not remained consistent; the Stevenson screen has not stayed in the same place and equipment used to measure temperature has changed also. Observations were first reported from the telegraph office and after it burnt down on 8 November 1874 the office moved to another building, which it shared with the post office. A new post office (with residence) was built in 1880 in Oxley Street several allotments east of the courthouse, which is on the Richards Street corner (Figure 1). The second storey was added in 1889 and modifications continued until telegraph and postal services merged to form the Post Master Generals Department in 1901. The large 230-litre Stevenson screen installed in 1908 moved at least once in the post office yard and from the 1950s it was shaded and surrounded by watered lawns. It was replaced (and probably moved) in 1964 and due to continuing “vegetation problems” observations ceased there in August 1996. Thermometers were observed in another 230-litre screen beside a dusty track at the second airport north of town in 1994. That site was superseded by an automatic weather station (AWS) 700 m away in 1999, which used a small 60-litre screen and which reported whole-degrees before 2002. The many temperature values that were culled shows the AWS was frequently over-range, probably because its rapid-sampling probe operating in the small screen recorded flurries of warm air that would not affect thermometers housed in large screens; or that due to calibration problems it was prone to spiking on warm days. The AWS site was ploughed-around in 2013, which made it even hotter  Figure 1. The approach to the then RAAF landing ground in 1941 looking north over Bourke to the Darling River. The courthouse (C), Lands Department (L) and post office (P) facing Oxley Street are visible with trees (T) established around the post office (From the National Library of Australia aerial photograph collection). Understanding data requires careful analyses and research. Step-changes detected using independent statistical tests are aligned with reports in newspapers and archives (National Archives and National Library of Australia); museums like the Airways Museum at Essendon and the RAAF Museum at Point Cook; and checked using historic aerial photographs and Google Earth Pro (Figure 2). Bourke temperatures are hotter now than in the past because of site changes, not the climate. Because sites change, data collected to describe the weather are often not useful for benchmarking trends in the climate. Shade, watering and the new building caused changes at the post office and the hotter it was the more watering was probably done to cool the place down. Daytime temperature is warmer at the airport especially in summer and Google Earth Pro satellite images show the current AWS site was ploughed around before 2013, which according to Blair Trewin[2] is “Australia’s hottest ever year”. The most recent ‘record’ temperature at Bourke (48.3oC on 12 January 2013) is due to ploughing not the weather.  Figure 2. Close-up views of high-level (25,000 feet (7,600 m)) aerial photographs shows the post office (P) with trees in the yard, the Lands Department office (L) and courthouse (C) on the Oxley-Richard Street corner in 1952. By 1963 a new building (?) (which Google Street View shows is now a bank) occupies the vacant lot which before 1877 was to have been the town goal.
Its hot when it’s dry and cool when its not and careful analysis outlined in the attached Bulletin shows the climate of Bourke hasn’t changed. Temperature trends and frequency of upper-range extremes has not increased. The AWS-site is neglected; out-of-range values are selectively culled because electronic thermometers housed in dusty 60-litre Stevenson screens spike randomly on warm days. Recent temperature records at Bourke are due to ploughing; those at Wanaaring are due to the small screen moving from behind the post office, where the lawn was watered, to beside the dusty track to the tip in 2003. Brewarrina’s data are warmed after 2002 by new hospital accommodation; while at Cobar data are affected by urban encroachment. Like ploughing, establishing AWS at the hottest sites imaginable (Figure 3) is just another trick. While the Bureau warms the data the climate hasn’t warmed or changed.  Figure 3. Eight of 11 new AWS established in NSW in 2017 are in the arid northwest corner where its bound to be hot. (Pre-existing sites are in upper-case.) (Map courtesy of Google Earth Pro.)
HomogenisationACORN-SAT is the sum of its parts and Bourke is just another example of where arbitrary changes create trends that don’t reflect local weather. Recent claims of record warming are not supported by individual site data. (Bourke homogenisation is outlined in Part B of the Bulletin.) Across the network site-changes are not rigorously documented, some are ignored and some that make no difference are adjusted as though they did. Furthermore, selecting faulty (correlated) data to adjust ACORN-SAT datasets results in bias. The default position that unexplained data-changes are attributed to the climate allows climate-changes to be specified in advance and data to be homogenised accordingly. Australia’s ACORN-SAT temperature datasets are riddled with problems. The process is opaque; lacks statistical control; synchronous inter-site changes such as replacing 230-litre screens with 60-litre ones and thermometers by AWS at infrequently serviced sites beside dusty tracks and in paddocks at airports, are propagated across the network by the process. Thus few ACORN-SAT datasets are independent of collective problems. Using comparator data that are not homogeneous to adjust faults in ACORN-SAT has no merit and should be abandoned. Conclusions
The full 8 page report is here: Welcome to the back of Bourke where they make the weather warmer.
[1] Bill is a former NSW Department of Natural Resources scientist with extensive experience in weather monitoring and climate data analysis. [2] https://theconversation.com/2013-was-australias-hottest-year-warm-for-much-of-the-world-21670 February 26th, 2018 | Tags: Australian temperatures, BOM, Homogenization (temperature data), Johnston (Bill) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | …  Image of offshore wind farms. Baltic Sea Wikimedia | Mariusz Paździora We are trying to collect dilute erratic energy, spread over hundreds of square kilometers in windy, salty, and wet conditions with machines that spin at 330km/hour. What could possibly go wrong? From: “Offshore wind fiasco” at GWPF — The original story in Danish. Ørsted must repair up to 2,000 wind turbine blades because the leading edge of the blades have become worn down after just a few years at sea. The wind turbine owner will not disclose the bill, but says that the financial significance is “small”. The cost of repair is so small they need to keep it a secret. But it can’t be cheap. For the most repairs, the blades need to be brought down, shipped and fixed on land. Repairing them at sea is a rare feat. This must be the infamous leading edge erosion.The Offwhore Wind Industry website discussed this type of damage in 2015: Large rotors lead to large yields, but also to lots of annoyance – at least as far as the coating is concerned. After only a few years, the protective layer that is supposed to prevent erosion is already worn out. Materials that really last for 20 years are still being worked on. The ever larger rotor blades have led to increasing rotation speeds of the blade tips. Offshore, speeds of up to 90 m/s are now reached. This is around 330 km/h. At these speeds, raindrops and hailstones hit the coating like bullets and remove the erosion protection like a pressure washer. After that, the rain washes away the rest of the coating layers and in the worst case exposes the blade structure. The tips and the leading edges of the blades are most affected. Because the aerodynamics also get ruined along with the protective coating, the repair costs are accompanied by a loss in yield for the operator. Various studies estimate these losses to be between 4 and 10 %. If delamination sets in, this can quickly rise to 20 %. It would already be an improvement if the erosion protection lasted six to seven years on the blade tips…. Apparently the protective coatings need a protective coating. There is a steep loss of power as the leading edge erodes. Significant blade erosion could cause up to a 5% power loss each year, according to Blade Dynamics sales and marketing manager Theo Botha. The lifespan of a wind turbine offshore is supposed to be 25 years. Back in 2012 land-based wind farms in the UK were found to show signs of wearing out in just 12 years. For onshore wind, the monthly ‘load factor’ of turbines – a measure of how much electricity they generate as a percentage of how much they could produce if on at full power all the time – dropped from a high of 24 per cent in the first year after construction, to just 11 per cent after 15 years. For offshore wind –examined only in Denmark where it has been used for longer – it declined even more dramatically from over 40 per cent at the start, to just 15 per cent after ten years. The bigger wind farms were less efficient than the small. There is a five year guarantee on the rotor blades.
California councils sue Exxon but Exxon fights back: Will that be Fake Fear or Fake Bonds?‘Cross Examination Is Going To Be Brutal’: NYU Law Prof Says Climate Change Litigation Is A LoserSome Californian councils launched climate litigation against Exxon because they will be wiped out by floods. But at the same time the same councils issued bonds and forgot to mention that the local area was going to be washed away. Since 1990 or so, the bonds are worth in the order of $8 billion according to a petition from Exxon. The Competitive Enterprize Institute is calling on the SEC to investigate regarding potential fraud. The councils have painted themselves in to a terminally awkward corner: Are they money grubbers using false propheses to scare up some money, or are they deceptive bond dealers? For example, San Mateo County claimed in its complaint to be “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” with a 93 percent the county will experience a “devastating” flood before 2050. “If sea levels were to raise that high, it most certainly would be catastrophic,” Epstein said. However, bond offerings in the last few years by those counties and cities weren’t so forthcoming about those predictions, Exxon said in a verified petition filed last month with the District Court in Tarrant County, Texas. San Mateo’s 2014 and 2016 bond offerings told would-be investors that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur,” Exxon’s petition said. The councils accused fossil fuel companies of causing their losses, but the counties and cities consume and produces a lot of fossil fuels itself. [NYU Prof] Epstein’s comments are among a number of voices claiming the counties’ and municipalities’ lawsuits against the energy companies are inherently flawed. Epstein and those other voices point out that California, which includes the counties and cities that filed the lawsuits, is both a great consumer and producer of the same fossil fuels the litigation claims are sowing the seeds of imminent climate change disaster. Those same fossil fuels also help drive the state’s economy, the sixth-largest in the world, Epstein and others say. “These counties and cities are huge consumers of energy,” Epstein said. Looks like someone didn’t think this through. It’s never a good idea to launch litigation as a fashion statement or as a form of tribal warfare.
Obviously we need to understand it so we can Richard Lindzen’s introduction: [Booker] asks how do otherwise intelligent people come to believe such arrant nonsense despite its implausibility, internal contradictions, contradictory data, evident corruption and ludicrous policy implications… The phenomenon of groupthink helps explain why ordinary working people are less vulnerable to this defect. After all, the group that the believers want to belong to is that of the educated elite. This may have played a major role in the election of Donald Trump, which depended greatly on the frustration of the non-elites (or ‘deplorables’, as Hillary Clinton referred to them) with what they perceived to be the idiocy of their ‘betters’ Booker himself: …I kick myself that I did not discover the book that inspired this paper until 2014. When I finally came across Irving Janis’s seminal analysis of ‘groupthink’, I realised just how much more it helped to explain about the story I and many others had been following for so long. The three rules of Groupthink:The late Professor Irving Janis analysed what happens when people get caught up in what he termed ‘groupthink’, a pattern of collective psychological behaviour with three distinctive features, that we can characterise as rules.
This paper begins by showing how strongly all these three symptoms were in evidence, right from the start… Read the whole paper at GWPF, click the book image or go here…
Electricity prices declined for forty years. Obviously that had to stop.Here’s is the last 65 years of Australian electricity prices — indexed and adjusted for inflation. During the coal boom, Australian electricity prices declined decade after decade. As renewables and national energy bureaucracies grew, so did the price of electricity. Must be a coincidence… Today all the hard-won masterful efficiency gains of the fifties, sixties and seventies have effectively been reversed in full.  Indexed Real Consumer Electricity Prices, Australia, 1955-2017. For most of the 20th Century the Australian grid was hotch potch of separate state grids and mini grids. (South Australia was only connected in 1990). In 1998 the NEM (National Energy Market) began, a feat that finally made bad management possible on a large scale. Though after decades of efficiency gains, Australians would have to wait years to see new higher “world leading” prices. For the first years of the NEM prices stayed around $30/MWh. But sooner or later a national system is a sitting duck for one small mind to come along and truly muck things up. Please spread this graph far and wide. Thanks to a Dr Michael Crawford who did the original, excellent graph. For decades the power price fell, –Ruairi February 21st, 2018 | Tags: Electricity Cost, Electricity Grids, Inflation, Renewable Energy | Category: Big-Government, Economics, Electricity, Global Warming, Grids, Renewable | Print This Post | | UPDATE: 6:30pm for a 6:45 start. AGL has promised to close the Liddell Coal generators early. Why won’t they sell this generator? Perhaps they want to save the planet (Corporate Saints?!), or maybe is it better for business not to have another cheap coal plant competing with their profitable gas and subsidized-renewables generators in Australia? Perhaps they like to feast off million dollar power price spikes and forced subsidies from the Renewable Energy Target? How screwed is our free market when the cheapest form of generation is so “worthless” corporates buy it to “throw it away”? Archibald is a take-no-prisoners presenter. If you can get there, do! Save Liddell and keep the Hunter Valley working (not to mention our national grid).Thursday 22nd February, Singleton Diggers Club, cnr York and Church St Singleton, NSW.
Presented by David Archibald, Geologist, climate scientist and energy analyst. Contact David.archibald AT westnet.com.au Ph 0410 664 853 …. Funny how the answer to everything always turns out to be a pet lefty cause? TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE, EDUCATE GIRLS AND GIVE THEM BIRTH CONTROLRobyn George Andrews has a paradigm shaker: if we could just keep girls in school, and give them contraception — droughts, floods and nasty storms will go away. I wonder if condoms are better than the pill for climate control? Andrews seems to think that if we could somehow just sneak teachers with emergency girls schools into Rwanda et al, the atmosphere on the Third Rock will right itself and achieve the stable ideal weather that it never had. Too bad about the boys though. As it happens, in Rwanda, they’re slightly more likely to miss out on school than girls are (88% of boys, versus 90% of girls attend primary school). If we could just fix that gender bias… Nevermind about Rule of Law, endemic crime and corruption, and a complete lack of infrastructure, if the girls had studied The Sociology of Myley Cyrus (at Skidmore) they’d be too busy tweeting about twerking to overpopulate the planet and generate hot spots and cold holes in the atmosphere. But Andrews seems to have missed the real and devastating implications of female educationOn Earth, the more we educate women, the higher our emissions are. I graphed UNDP and World Bank statistics, and the trend is stark:  There’s no hope for Earth if we keep educating women.
Give women more than five years schooling, and the planet is facing a crisis. It’s simply impossible to keep per capita emissions below 2 Mt.Perhaps someone had better let Andrews know, or maybe he does, (he is really a satirist, right?) Keep reading → Brought to you by the Theory That Can Never Be Wrong — what’s the opposite of hot? A hole! Next time you are feeling cold you will know you are in a hole instead. Stop digging. Snow-covered beaches? Chilly iguanas? They are part of a mysterious ‘hole’ in global warmingBY STUART LEAVENWORTH, February 15, 2018 05:00 AM … “according to a scientific study published this month, the Southeast’s colder winter weather is part of an isolated trend, linked to a more wavy pattern in the jet stream that crosses North America. That dipping jet stream allows artic air to plunge into the Southeast. Scientists call this colder weather a “hole” in overall global warming, or a “warming hole.” “What we are looking at is an anomaly,” said Jonathan M. Winter, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and the principle investigator in the study. “The Southeast is the exception to the rule.” Coming soon, new discoveries will show that the Little Ice Age was not cold, just part of an isolated trend that happened all over the world. This particular modern hole is happening over SE USA. Obviously some of the cold air in the upper troposphere is falling down the hole. The Southeast’s warming hole has been studied many times before, but the Dartmouth study in Geophysical Research Letters nails down some of its key features. The study concludes the trend started in the late 1950s, and is concentrated in six states — Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Nearby states are also affected, such as east Texas, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina. Genius communication analysts with PhDs at Yale have done a study that shows no one (especially not truck drivers or farmers in redneck states) could doubt university experts except through random happenstance or because of cold weather. Either because of coincidence or cooler climes, residents of these states tend to be relatively doubtful that global warming is happening and is largely caused by human activities, according to surveys compiled by Yale and George Mason universities. This new discovery changes many things. During hole-y times when you might get goosebumps, don’t turn on the heater, get into the troposphere and fix the hole with some pink batts. Next month, we’ll find out that every day is an anomaly.
February 19th, 2018 | Tags: Cooling & cold snaps, Junk Science | Category: Global Warming, Junk Science, Pseudoscience | Print This Post | |
Just another day at a suburban beach in Perth at sunset. See the hordes… Clearly Perth has too many beaches. The weekly wrap: Renewables will have a minor place, Renewables can’t make the Vic. grid blossom, Some eco-activists have necks of brass, The I.P.C.C. leaks a warming scare, A state grid that runs smoothly on the cheap, -Ruairi |
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