Who knew? Penguins are not only a “sentinel species” warning us about climate change in Antarctica but “Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature“. More warming equals more penguins.
So just as we can use trees as thermometers, we can use penguins as thermometers. And when we do, we find that there was a veritable boom in penguins in the Ross Sea 1,000 years ago.
As one of the most important ‘sentinel species’ in the Antarctic ecosystem, the Adélie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae) is widely distributed in the Ross Sea region and its population is extremely sensitive to climate change (Ainley, 2002; Ainley et al., 2010). Since the International Geophysical Year in 1957, researchers have conducted extensive field investigations on climate change (including temperature, SST, sea ice, and polynyas) and Adélie penguin populations in Antarctica.
Modern monitoring data also show that Adélie penguin breeding is closely linked to temperature…
After comparing with historical records of penguin populations at Cape Bird, Dunlop Island, and Cape Adare, all were found to have a common increase during the 750-1350 AD period in the Ross Sea.
So at the same time the Vikings were getting into the spirit of Greenland, the penguins were having some parties of their own on the far side of the Earth. And even though climate experts have told us a million times that the Medieval Warm Period was just a localized phenomenon in Europe, it was also warm in Antarctica, and most other places, and no one seems to be able to find the part of the planet that was colder which would bring that average back to normal.
As it happens, another study last year showed Elephant seals and penguins lived on the Ross Sea for thousands of years until the horrible cold of the Little Ice Age wiped out them out. Seriously, researchers refer to the era three or four thousand years ago as “The Penguin Optimum”. So this is yet another study using different markers but reinforcing the same finding. (That one used diatoms, this one looked at a footprint of elements in penguin guano — P, Cu, Zn, Sr, Cd, Ca, and As.)
The climate experts also told us a million times that global warming would wipe out the penguins, but instead it turns out, global cooling does.
In the full figure we can see a whole stack of climate variables that all rise and fall in cycles that bear no resemblance to changes of CO2:
“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.
Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.
Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.
So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.
Gupta now says that ““The fundamentals are very poor”. Which is true if you were fundamentally betting on government handouts. The truth is the electrical fundamentals of Green investment were always awful, as were the “carbon” fundamentals. Investors should have got better advice from friends who were engineers who saw that unreliable renewables were an expensive fantasy that were doomed years ago.
He still claims there is some long term need for a clean energy transition, but his big plan is to find the “corners” of the market where he can identify “supply-chain bottlenecks as core investment opportunities”. Apparently that means he’s moved into companies that make compressors, vacuum systems and switches and fuses. Which sounds a lot like a man who’s stepped right out of the clean energy space.
The fall for clean energy shares started at the end of September last year, presumably as it dawned on green investors that Kamala was not going to win and keep the subsidies rolling.
The great unravelling of the Green delusion continues. Amazing that there is still 80% of the clean energy sector value left on the chopping block.
The world is about to flip from an energy diet to an electrical boom. Look at Texas.
Here in Australia our top Blob Scientists tell us it will take 15 years to build one nuclear plant. But in Texas, which has two nuclear plants already, the AI revolution is beating down the door, and it’s saying “Feed me 30 plants for breakfast ” — or at least by 2030. It’s like a different planet.
There are already 340 datacentres in Texas which use 8GW of power, but new projects are so large, they are starting to ask for a whole gigawatt up front. And the sum total of requests for new electrical supply add up to 99 gigawatts — most of which have materialized in the last year. The new level of demand is so big, the grid managers are starting to worry that single new industrial loads are large enough to threaten the grid.
We’re talking of a seismic shift:
The ERCOT grid peak load last summer was 86 gigawatts. The new peak demand by 2030 is expected to be 75% bigger. It may not all be nuclear, ERCOT did ask for “the equivalent” of 30 new nuclear plants. But it will be big and fast.
Texas has 31 million people. Australia has 26 million (plus a million foreign uni students). We’re performing a national pantomime over whether it’s realistic to build a few nuclear plants and a couple of SMR’s, as if we’re plotting to build the first colony on Venus. Meanwhile Texas is leading the revolution.
“We’ve never existed in a place where large industrial loads can really impact the reliability of the grid, and now we are stepping into that world.”
[Bloomberg]— Demand on the Texas power grid is expected to expand so immensely that it would take the equivalent of adding 30 nuclear plants’ worth of electricity by 2030 to meet the needs.
That’s according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid. The forecast is based on the addition of new data centers needed to power artificial intelligence. And it’s raising concerns about whether infrastructure in the state will be able to expand fast enough — and at what cost.
Individual projects are already starting to request 1 gigawatt of power and they pose new risks to maintaining a stable grid, said Agee Springer, Ercot’s senior manager of grid interconnections. A gigawatt is typically enough to power 250,000 homes in Texas.
Ercot said it’s gotten requests equal to 99 gigawatts for new connections to the grid from big power users, including data centers, bitcoin miners and hydrogen producers, according to an internal grid presentation Thursday. That’s up from 40.8 gigawatts last March.
There’s a big question as to whether infrastructure can be built fast enough because of supply chain issues, resulting in long wait times for things like big turbines to produce electricity and other key equipment such as transformers. Another critical issues is who is going to pay for all of this build out.
None of the AI teams are begging for wind or solar power. If Australia were to build new coal plants, or new nuclear plants with spare capacity, Big AI would be here in a flash. The La Trobe Valley could become a world leading AI centre if the government was willing to keep using the 300 years of cheap brown coal there. At 3 cents a kilowatt hour wholesale, it’s still the cheapest electricity on the planet.
Do we want to be the coal and iron mine at the edge of the world, or would we like to ride the revolution?
It’s a slow moving category 2 storm, that won’t set any wind speed records, but will cross paths with 3 or 4 million people. Current wind speeds at 20 locations are available here. Let’s just hope it doesn’t rain for too long. The latest BOM report says sustained winds are 95km / hour with gusts to 130 km/hr. (Roughly 60 to 80 mph).
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDQ65002.shtml
If “Climate Change” has any effect on Australian cyclones, it’s to reduce them:
With the usual logic and reason of top climate experts, this suggests that car engines, burgers, cows and coal can prevent cyclones. Anyone driving an EV, or eating vegeburgers clearly doesn’t care about koalas (or delicate solar panels):
Without forced theft from the poor, Sunnova (and others in the solar industry) might disappear
Bloomberg writers call it “chaos” and Barrons blames Trump for “uncertainty”, but the truth is the value of solar was always a false bubble held up by forced payments, fantasy, or vicarious political whimsy that spread the costs onto other people. Trump has merely restored the certainty of real value in the free market. He hasn’t banned a single person from buying solar panels, it’s just that not many people want to spend their money on glass panels that make green expensive electrons. They don’t want to spend money on “cheap electricity” that only comes at lunchtime either.
The 70% fall in the stock price is just the last few days since Sunnova officially warned it might not be a “going concern”. The longer term figures are much worse.
On November 4th, when some investors though the word-salad-woman might win, the share price briefly spiked to $7. Right now it is 58 cents, meaning it has lost 92 percent of its value since Trump won the election. The entire $12 mini-boom peak in September last year, arguably, was a bet that Kamala-grift would be worth something.
Sunnova has $3 billion in assets (allegedly), and employs 1,200 people according to Wiki. (Or it did).
Sunnova Energy International Inc. shares plunged 71% as the company warned there’s substantial doubt it will remain in business. That came less than a week after First Solar Inc., the biggest US solar manufacturer, said it was seeing increasing customer delays. And it was also on the heels of Sunrun Inc., the biggest US residential solar company, saying it expects installation volumes to be flat this year.
The US solar industry is in the midst of the biggest reckoning it’s faced since going mainstream more than a decade ago.
Solar had been viewed as a crucial answer for dealing with rising electric demand while capping global emissions…
Analysts have been lowering their home solar installation projections in 2025 after installs fell by nearly 20% in 2024. And meanwhile, the Trump administration and Congress are considering moving to cut the tax credits that Sunnova and others have counted on to generate cash. That’s on top of a federal freeze of loans and grants that were aided by Biden’s signature climate law.
It’s all the fault of the “uncertain regulatory policies” — even though Trump is dead set certain he will not subsidize these things.
What they mean to say is Donald Trump has turned off the tap, and the solar panels weren’t worth buying if other people didn’t pay:
The rooftop solar industry has struggled lately, because fewer people are installing solar panels due to high interest rates and unfavorable or uncertain regulatory policies. As of December, energy-data firm Wood Mackenzie said 2024 U.S. installations were on track to fall 26% from the year before. The Trump administration’s policies have only added more uncertainty.
“The overall environment is terrible,” said Sunnova CEO John Berger on a conference call with analysts. “I mean, it’s the political environment, the capital markets—look at the equity trading off. And so, that just gets everybody in a very bad mood, candidly.”
Yahoo Finance blames high interest rates as if the long artificially low interest rates, set by a government appointed politburo-style-committee, weren’t just another sort of subsidy.
Much of the industry’s turbulence can be traced to high interest rates and uncertainty about the future of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Solar installers have benefited in the past from low interest rates, which make solar loans and leasing attractive to consumers. By spreading the cost of rooftop solar over many years, consumers don’t have to pay up front and often save relative to their monthly utility bills. But as rates have risen, it can take longer for consumers to benefit financially.
On the policy front, the Inflation Reduction Act extended tax credits that were set to expire at the end of last year. The new credits run through 2032, though the Trump administration has vowed to unravel the law.
It’s one of the best kept secrets of modern civilization, that low interest rates steal from long term savers and subsidize speculators and borrowers (rich people). The central bankers force institutions to charge low rates, lots of people borrow money, which increases the money supply hunting for things in the same limited pool of goods. In turn, that creates inflation and steals the purchasing power from every dollar — from children and grandparents alike.
Bloomberg writers think Trump creates chaos, but the truth is that the whole fake market in solar has been one gigantic bubble. At one point in early 2021, Sunnova shares were selling for $53.
There’s nothing like a few belligerent trade spats, and miscreant dragged anchors to ruin a brand’s reputation
After six separate incidents of underwater cables being sabotaged in the Baltic Sea, the German Defense Ministry is wondering if it is wise to buy Chinese wind turbines with all their electronic parts. A new report commissioned for the department not only suggests the government should restrict new turbines, it advises them to call a halt to an existing project.
Hypothetically, China might remotely shut down wind turbines at a key moment, creating crazy price spikes, and industrial havoc (although wind turbines seem quite good at that on their own). But seriously, if wind turbines got a bit more random, or a bit less efficient, would anyone know for sure? And if a market player had that information in advance, they could make out like a bandit — bidding at the right moment, and collecting on all the price spikes. It would be just another way to bleed a country, raise electricity prices, and reduce it’s competitiveness. (But good for business back home, eh? )
Oddly, the Defense analysts seem to worry more that China might delay projects on purpose, which sounds like an act of kindness to me. But if the electricity managers had already blown up the coal plants, then it might leave a vulnerable gigawatt gap.
Some thing has to charge the big batteries and pumped hydro, after all or they won’t be there for the dinner time peak. Likewise with the EVs.
The report, which the German defense ministry commissioned, argues Beijing could purposefully delay projects, harvest sensitive data and remotely shut down turbines if given access to wind farms. It also advises the country to stop an existing wind project using Chinese turbines from going ahead.
“When using systems or components from Chinese manufacturers … given the political situation, it can even be assumed that such a slowdown or even disruption would be deliberately used by China as a means of political pressure or even as an instrument of economic warfare,” reads the report, prepared last month by the German Institute for Defense and Strategic Studies think tank.
“A destabilization of both the political system, the business model of German industry and social cohesion cannot therefore be ruled out due to a lack of or insufficient planning security in the energy sector,” it adds.
But they were also concerned China could harvest data from hundreds of radars, and be able to spy on military training sites.
Part of the danger also comes from the access that manufacturers get to turbines, according to the study. Beijing’s suppliers would have access to computer programs that control active turbines and collect data from hundreds of radars built into farms, it states — a significant issue given that wind produced a third of Germany’s electricity last year and a fifth of the EU’s power.
In sum, the report argues, that would hand China “considerable blackmail potential in the future.”
The report warns that the “first time use of Chinese wind turbines must be prevented” on “public safety” grounds, since it risks creating a reliance on Beijing’s expertise and giving it access to “essential elements of German critical infrastructure” near militarily relevant training areas.
The Defence team also suspect the Chinese projects are being subsidized by China to beat out European competitors. It’s almost a case of China-would-be-crazy if they weren’t. The more renewables they supply, the more incapacitated and deindustrialized Europe gets, and the easier it is for the rest of China’s factories to drive competitors out of business.
Think of renewables as loss-leaders for a whole civilization.
Wow. Just Wow. Trump gets elected and Reuters realizes renewable energy is unrealistic
In a rush, at least one opinion writer at Reuters is suddenly saying all the things skeptics have been saying for years: all the things Reuters has hidden from the world about renewable energy.
It is hard to believe, but it’s all there… the naked utter failure of solar and wind to reduce CO2, to reduce oil and gas, and to reduce prices. Edward Chancellor calls it a “resounding failure”. He has the devastating figures, and even the graph showing how countries with more renewables have more expensive electricity. He has another graph of the share market failure of renewables compared to the fossil fuel success, and he uses the words “tumbled” and “soared”. To grind it home, he explains how we just export our manufacturing to China which uses coal (is this news?). He calls Net Zero an “illusion” where we think we lower our emissions but we actually raise them overseas.
LONDON, Feb 27 (Reuters Breakingviews) – The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions has been a resounding failure. Despite trillions of dollars spent on renewable energy, hydrocarbons still account for over 80% of the world’s primary energy and a similar share of recent increases in energy consumption, according to The Energy Institute. Coal, oil and natural gas production are at record highs. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise inexorably. The financial markets were already losing confidence in the energy transition before Donald Trump returned to the White House. A more realistic approach to climate policy is urgently needed.
What they don’t say is that all this was unmistakably obvious for a decade or more, that thousands of engineers and scientists have been telling the world this would happen, and that Reuters wouldn’t report them, not even when they had a Nobel prize.
Solar and wind power have grown to a mere 3.5% of primary energy production. The levelised cost of renewable energy – which measures of the net present value of electricity produced over a plant’s lifetime – has declined sharply over the years. But this has not resulted into lower electricity prices. In fact, as the share of the energy mix provided by renewables has risen, electricity prices have tended to increase. That’s because wind and solar power are intermittent. Since storing energy in batteries is uneconomic, traditional sources of power are still needed as backup, which is expensive.
Why now? Because reality is making Reuters look stupid — it’s not the reality of high costs or blackouts, but the reality that Trump won, and set fire to the “transition” fantasy by dumping Paris, dropping subsidies, opening gas fields, and installing a corporate energy CEO as the US Energy Secretary. Chris Wright and JD Vance are dropping truth bombs in speeches that can’t be ignored. Word is spreading fast, and if Reuters don’t report this, they risk being turned into the same irrelevant wreckage the US mainstream media channels already are. As the US economy ramps up, other countries will have to let go of their green delusions in order to keep up. The game changed. There’s no point upping the ante in the UN-poker game if the main player has played a Royal Flush.
Even the graph! An actual graph!
Source Reuters and Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2024
Two graphs!
Presumably the owners of Reuters have sold out of their renewable stocks. (Readers here read about this trend in October 2023.)
Source: Reuters, and S&P | P.Thal Larsen.
So this is arse-covering, forgive the language, but this is also an escape clause for allies and believers
The owners of Reuters (whoever they are) — are presumably part of The Blob, since they have covered up its failures for decades, and gave millions to Hillary. This article is also an escape clause for allies and a warning to jump ship. It’s full of excuses — we were misled by an era of low interest rates; we had good intentions; we didn’t realize China made all our stuff with coal, you know, and Energy transitions take a very long time. What a shock!
The way Edward Chancellor writes, anyone could have got this wrong. Even the oil giants made mistakes, you know, and are now looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business. Never is there any question that say, National Energy Managers ought to have done their homework, or that Energy Ministers should have done due diligence before recklessly trying to transform electricity grids based on what Al Gore and a teenage girl told them to do:
Not long ago, investors worried that traditional energy companies would be left with “stranded assets” – oil and gas fields abandoned as demand for fossil fuels dried up. Yet earlier this month Shell (SHEL.L), opens new tab announced a near-$1 billion writedown for its investment in a wind project off the New Jersey coast. BP (BP.L), opens new tab is scrapping targets for increasing generation of renewable energy and cutting oil and gas production. As Lees writes, “across the sector, oil majors that shifted their portfolios to green energy are now realising their mistake and are looking to rebuild their fossil fuel business.”
The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels.The energy expert Vaclav Smil has likened the costs of the planned energy transition to those incurred by a nation fighting total war for decades on end. The era of zero interest rates created a sense that the supply of capital was infinite and its cost negligible. Rising interest rates dispelled that illusion. The economics of wind and solar power, with their large upfront investment costs and relatively low operating expenses, have been upended. Wood Mackenzie calculates that every 2 percentage point increase in the risk-free rate raises the levelised cost of renewable electricity by around 20%.
I’ve always said there will come a day when everyone says “I was always a skeptic”
This is the start of that normalization. It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning of the end in the energy battle.
But it’s not even the start of the science battle. They’re still “believers” of big-gov bad-science. The world still urgently needs an alternative to fossil fuels….
What the world still urgently needs are real journalists and honest media. It needs accountable Ministers, and bureaucrats that get sacked. If we don’t learn from the last mistakes, the next episode of parasitic loot-and-pillage is just around the corner.
People with a good education are hard to fool, which is why the curriculum buries the good stuff until it disappears under a kiloton of culture, engagement and sustainability blah. Then the media (with US government Blob funding) repeats the hypnotic trance line “seas are rising due to climate change” until anyone who was accidentally taught real science, forgets it.
How many children (how many adults) think that sea levels have been the same for a million years? The travesty of 12 years of education is that 99% of people know nothing about 99% of history, and even less about prehistory. Every one of these defenseless souls is so easily fooled into panic attacks about seas rising a millimeter a year. “Unprecedented” they say! Don’t use the hair-dryer!
Willie Soon has some fun in his time machine zipping through ancient Greece and Roman history, where ports were built 6 crazy kilometers from the sea…
And after two world wars, 1.5 billion cars and 35 million planes a year, the rate of sea level rise is pretty much the same as it was in 1860 or so. It’s like we are irrelevant…
[Graphed by Joanne Nova based on data from Jevrejura et al located at this site PMSML]
By Jo Nova
By Jo Nova
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