Correction to Summary section of earlier post re UK Weather Dependent Renewables

An excellent way to undermine Western economies is to render their power generation unreliable and expensive.  That objective of Green thinking is progressively being achieved by Government policies throughout the Western world, but without any popular mandate.

Summary

The output figures used here are from Gridwatch as megawatts recorded hourly.  These are totalled up  to give the equivalent power yearly output for each generation technology in Gigawatts.

All conventional dispatchable power technologies can produce at a capacity percentage in the region of 90%, just accounting for routine maintenance.  Indeed they would achieve that high level of productivity, were it not for the political imposition of Weather Dependent Renewables.  The UK installed fleet of about 28GW of Gas-fired generation, which at 90% productivity could be producing ~25GW.  But the actual productivity / capacity percentage of gas-fired generation in the UK is limited, by Climate Change policy, to less than 40%, and so over the year it is limited to only produce at a rate of ~11GW over the year.

The “Renewables Obligation” means that when any Renewable generation is available, it, by policy, displaces conventional dispatchable CO2 emitting power sources.  Dispatchable generation mainly Gas-firing is thus forced to run inefficiently, becomes unprofitable and progressively less viable.  In other words, this policy may reduce some CO2 emissions but at the same time it eliminates base-load power and thus destabilises and makes the UK power supply grid ever more fragile.

It is clear from the diagram above the present UK Gas-fired generation installations could fully supply the UK overall power demand and meet maximum demand were they running at full productivity / capacity percentage, and any contribution from installed Weather Dependent Wind or Solar power would be superfluous.  An estimate of the costs of the UK Weather Dependent Renewables fleet is about 65 £billion, as opposed to about 8£ billion for Gas-firing for the same power provision.

Whereas a safe / sane operating margin for a Grid should be about 20% of dispatchable power, the UK margin fell to close to nil in 2017.  Power supplies in the UK are thus at ever increasing risk.

It should also be noted that the UK has, by policy, surrendered a significant part of its power generation overseas to supplies from Europe, mainly Nuclear generation from France.  In the light of recent post-Brexit French threat to cut off power supplies to the British Crown Dependencies of the Channel Islands in the negotiation of a fishing dispute.

The UK dependence on any overseas generation has itself become a significant risk and should be regarded as an existential National emergency.

The chart below shows the progress that has been made in installing Weather Dependent Renewables in the UK to reach the status shown above according two the Renewable Energy foundation data.This post uses installation and generated power output data from the UK Renewable Energy Foundation 2020 to track the progress of the UK Weather Dependent Renewables, (Wind and Solar), fleet of generators since 2002.  The use of that data to results in the following:

• an assessment of  the Productivity / Capacity percentage, of the UK Renewable generation fleet since 2002 has achieved an overall productivity of ~22%.  That productivity percentage may vary marginally on an annual basis as a result of Weather conditions.
• in combination with summary comparative cost data from the US Energy Information Administration, (EIA), on different power generation technologies, (capital and long-term), it compares the bare capital costs and long-term probable future monetary commitments that are incurred by the 2020 UK fleet of Weather Dependent Renewables.
• overall combined Weather Dependent Renewables are roughly 10 times the cost of using Gas-firing and about 1.5 times the capital cost and 2.5 times the long-term cost of Nuclear power for same nominal electrical power production.
• as of end 2020 it assesses the estimated capital cost of the UK Weather Dependent Renewables fleet to be about 65£billion.
• the present UK 2020 Weather Dependent Renewables fleet would incur an estimated long-term cost commitment of about 250£billion.
• the extreme costs of Solar Power in the UK when accounting for it’s low productivity / capacity percentage.
• the high future cost commitments that are entailed in the mandating of Offshore power even when accounting for their better productivity / capacity percentage.
• in addition Weather Dependent Renewable generation technologies do not provide inertia in the power supply Grid.  Inertia is crucial in ensuring immediate resilience to maintain Grid frequency in any emergency.  As they are unpredictable and variable Renewable technologies are cannot support the Grid in recovery after the Grid disaster of a “Black Start”.
• it estimates the maximum CO2 emissions savings achieved by the present UK Renewables fleet to be ~22 million tonnes.  This amounts to less than 6% of UK CO2 emissions, about 0.06% of 2019 Global CO2 emissions and about 4% of the 2020 growth of CO2 emissions from the developing world:

but, this value of averted emissions does not account for the CO2 emissions and energy requirements involved in sourcing, manufacture and installation of the physical elements of Weather Dependent Renewable generators.

• the additional CO2 emissions over Gas-firing for the same power output resulting from the use of overseas sourced Biomass, (nominally Carbon neutral, by policy), at the UK Drax power stations can be estimated to exceed at the maximum potential of 22 million tonnes of CO2 savings achieved by installing the whole UK fleet of Weather Dependent Renewables.

• extreme financial damage and loss of Grid reliability that is arising by the effective and politically pressurised elimination of UK and European Fracking technologies.  These have stopped access to indigenous Natural Gas for electricity generation both in the UK and throughout Europe.  These policies are only to the benefit of the sales of Russian controlled gas exports.

via The excess costs of Weather Dependent Renewables over Gas-firing for electricity generation

Some Cracks in the Mainstream Media view on Man-made Climate Change

Amazingly sceptical articles appeared in the Daily Mail 20 September 2017, in the Sunday Times 24 September 2017 and in the Wall Street Journal 19 November 2017

 

Now that’s an inconvenient truth:

Report shows the world isn’t as warm as the green doom-mongers warned. So will energy bills come down? Fat chance, says MP Graham Stringer

By Graham Stringer Labour Mp And Member Of Commons Science And Technology Committee

PUBLISHED: 01:48 GMT, 20 September 2017 | UPDATED: 02:00 GMT, 20 September 2017

 

Al Gore, the U.S. politician and self-appointed champion of the green cause, famously declared that ‘the science is settled’ on climate change.  It was a claim that revealed far more about the intolerance of the environmental movement than the reality of scientific inquiry.  Research should be founded on critical analysis of the evidence, not on wishful thinking or enforcement of a political ideology.

Now the hollowness of Gore’s assertion is exposed again by a vital new report that shows how the apocalyptic predictions of the green lobby have been exaggerated.

In a study just published by the respected journal Nature Geoscience, a group of British academics reveals that the immediate threat from global warming is lower than previously thought, because the computer models used by climate change experts are flawed.

According to these models, temperatures across the world should now be at least 1.3 degrees above the mid-19th century average, which is taken as a base level in such calculations. But the British report demonstrates that the rise is only between 0.9 and 1 degree.

That discrepancy is ‘a big deal’, says Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University, one of the authors of the study. He is absolutely right.

 

The importance of this new investigation cannot be downplayed.

It shows that so many of the assumptions behind the imposition of the fashionable eco agenda — such as the creation of vast, subsidised wind farms or the levying of green taxes — are wrong. Yet the environmental warriors show not a shred of embarrassment over these new findings.

The BBC has given a presenter a dressing down and warned him about his future conduct on his social media accounts following comments on Twitter.

 

Arrogance

There has been no word of apology, no sign of humility. Remarkably, they carry on preaching their diehard gospel. With their habitual arrogance, they argue that the lower levels of global warming mean that we now have even more time to implement their radical policies.

They don’t seem to have considered for a moment that we might consider throttling back on the extreme measures we’re told must be carried out to ‘save the planet’. They display such certainty because environmentalism increasingly resembles a religious creed.

That has certainly been my experience as a Labour MP, who, because of my own knowledge of science, has long been sceptical about the climate change doctrine.

This outlook has made me a target for green campaigners, who seem to think that no voices should be heard but their own.

A disgraceful example of this impulse towards censorship came recently from the geneticist and BBC presenter Dr Adam Rutherford, who hosts the Radio 4 programme Inside Science.

Taking on the role of latter-day witch-finder, Dr Rutherford recently launched a campaign to prevent my re-appointment to the Science and Technology Committee of the Commons, on the grounds of my scepticism about climate change.

Through social media, he urged his followers to show their ‘righteous indignation’ by writing to their MPs.

‘It is not OK to have science so misrepresented in a democracy,’ he declared.

It was outrageous for a BBC presenter to behave in this manner. The Corporation is meant to be an impartial broadcaster, not a political lobbyist.  Dr Rutherford has absolutely no business trying to dictate who sits on independent parliamentary committees.

Moreover, I do not accept his accusation that I somehow ‘misrepresent’ science.  I actually have a degree in chemistry from Sheffield University, and before I became a full-time politician I worked as an analytical chemist in the plastics industry.

The BBC has now given him a dressing down and warned him about his future conduct on his social media accounts.

That personalised campaign is not the first time I have had unhappy dealings with the BBC, which has long been a mouthpiece for environmental propaganda.

On one occasion, I made a programme with Conservative MP Peter Lilley and this paper’s writer Quentin Letts about the way the Meteorological Office has succumbed to the green orthodoxy.

Though the programme was broadcast, the BBC Trust subsequently decided it had breached editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality, which meant it could not be broadcast again, and cannot be found online.

 

Scandal

Like so many other public institutions, the BBC has adopted its eco posture without any genuine scientific literacy. Most BBC executives and reporters would be clueless about the second law of thermodynamics.

In this highly politicised field, adherence to the correct dogma seems to count more than an open mind.

But it was precisely my willingness to question received wisdom that led to my interest in the subject of global warming.

I was particularly intrigued by the infamous scandal at the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia in 2009, when a series of leaked emails appeared to show that scientists there had distorted historical research to suit the green narrative. As a member of the Science and Technology Select Committee, I followed the saga closely.

I was therefore disappointed when my colleagues on the Committee, having conducted an inquiry into the ‘Climategate’ scandal, did not come to a more robust conclusion about the scale of the scientific manipulation at the unit. Too many of them seemed to be following the herd.

But, as the latest report demonstrates, the weakness of the global warmists’ case is now obvious. This is not just a question of misreading data. It is essentially a matter of broken computer models and a determination to ignore any inconvenient truths.

 

Phoney

If the environmentalists had it right, we would now be facing global catastrophe, a scorched Earth and rapidly rising sea levels. None of that has happened.

The International Panel on Climate Change warned that the Himalayan glaciers were melting away, a claim that it later admitted was false.

Similarly, it was argued that global warming would bring a new wave of malaria sweeping across the world. The opposite has taken place: global malaria rates are falling.

The triumph of the environmentalists has had an enormous and costly impact on our daily lives. Successive governments have brought in green taxes, hiked fuel duties and pushed up energy bills.

The real price is paid not by the eco justice warriors wallowing in their phoney moral superiority, but by people like those in my Blackley and Broughton constituency, who struggle to meet their household running costs.

An extra £100 a year on electricity and gas might not be much to a BBC presenter, but it is a heck of a sum for someone who lives in the Harpurhey ward of Blackley, which was named in 2013 as the most deprived neighbourhood in England.

Experts also told us we should buy diesel cars because they would help us cut our CO2 emissions. Now the same vehicles are blamed for killing thousands a year with pollution.

Crucially, soaring energy costs for businesses thanks to green initiatives, especially in the manufacturing sector, cause real damage to the British economy by driving jobs overseas to India and China, both countries that are building coal-fired power stations at an astonishing rate.

This week’s scientific report should mark a return to environmental sanity in place of the current dangerous green fundamentalism.  But given my own experience, I wouldn’t bet on it.

 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-4901278/Report-shows-world-isn-t-warm-greens-warned.html#ixzz4zoL08alI

Rod Liddle. The Sunday Times September 24, 2017

CLIMATE BELIEVERS WONT GO COOL ON WARMING, THEY’VE AN INDUSTRY TO SUPPORT

If you find a spare moment this weekend, check out the online biography of Professor Michael Grubb. He is a busy and hitherto (one would hope) important man:

• Professor of climate change policy at University College London.
• Editor-in-chief of something called Climate Policy – hurry, hurry while stocks last.
• Adviser to the energy regulator Ofgem.
• Member of the government’s climate change committee.
• Adviser to the Germans on something to do with climate and to the European parliament’s exciting “progressive economy initiative”.

And ‘more, much more besides.

It’s a wonder Mikey even has time to step outside and see how the weather is looking, so feted has he been on account of his unquestionable knowledge about what is happening to our climate. Unquestionable, because climate change is a “settled science”, and those who question its reality or impact are “deniers”, like those who would deny the Holocaust ever happened.

Early one morning last week, as the dawn chorus began in what has been a colder September than usual, Mikey was roused from his slumbers by his wife, holding the report he’s just written, shrieking in his ear: “Professor Grubb, Professor Grubb, you have to know this: your entire life is a lie. Ha ha hal. All a terrible lie!”

OK, I cannot be entirely certain this happened. I don’t even know if Grubb has a wife. But it should have happened, even if it didn’t.

Last week we learnt from a study co-authored by Grubb in the impeccable and neutral source Nature Geoscience that we have all been taken for a costly ride by the climate change people. The Earth is not heating up anything like they all told us it was. For years they had been telling us we will very soon burn to a crisp, accompanied by the howling of polar bears. Grubb himself suggested in 2015 that we would need to abandon democracy to address the rapid and calamitous rise in the Earth’s temperature. Politicians were dragooned to the cause. Billions were spent in this country alone, subsidising useless wind farms and taxing ordinary people on their energy bills.

People who opposed these strictures – the deniers were called antediluvian and climate change activists demanded that those who challenged their views should not even be allowed to express their opinions.

Only they had the truth. Except, it wasn’t the truth.

So what went wrong? Take a look at Prof Grubb’s CV and you might get an inkling. Science is supposed to be neutral, but it is never so when co-opted for political reasons.

Call it “settled” and it becomes a kind of anti-science, an article of faith deeply resistant to investigation.

Call a university department “climate change” and you immediately sign up to it as-an indisputable fact.

And suddenly a huge and lucrative industry is born, with panels and intergovernmental committees, transnational policy initiatives, world summits and swingeing taxes on the poorest. And the climate change proponents are required to hype up the rhetoric, to provide politicians with suitably scary predictions.

Even after last week’s revelations in Nature Geoscience, the mentalist wing of the climate change lobby was still shrieking – in The Guardian, natch. It will all lead to “the collapse of civilisation”, one daffy woman reported, while a bloke called john “said those who disagreed with him were “elderly white male climate – deniers”.

Ah. John, I am white, male and getting elderly. I don’t deny the climate. I can see it, doing its stuff, outside my window.

And as a layman I would guess that we have probably contributed to the warming of the planet. How much? I don’t know – and nor do you, for that matter. You haven’t a clue. It’s just an article of faith.

And, as Karl Popper might tell you, that ain’t science.

Science is supposed to be neutral. It never is when co-opted for political reasons

 

 

Nigel Hawkes  The Sunday Times September 24, 2017

WE’RE NOT AS DOOMED AS WE WERE LED TO THINK

Climate scientists have admitted their estimates of global warming were wrong. So can we all chill out now? Not quite.

As egg-on-face moments go, it was a double-yolker. Last week a group of climate scientists published a paper that admitted the estimates of global warming used for years to torture the world’s conscience and justify massive spending on non-carbon energy Sources were, er, wrong.

Being wrong is not a criminal offence, especially in science, where in the long run almost everything turns out to be wrong, but the global warmers have adopted such a high-and-mighty tone to anyone who questions them that for sceptics this was pure joy.

The world may still be doomed, but it is not quite as doomed as the climatologists have repeatedly told us.

The admission was overdue acknowledgment of something that has been obvious for years. Despite the climate models predicting rapidly rising temperatures, between 1998 and 2013 temperatures barely rose at all. This was a pause, not a change in the underlying trend, the scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted. Global warming was still going on, even when it wasn’t.

The pause hadn’t been predicted by the computer models, but admitting that wasn’t really an option. Anxiety needed to be ramped up in order to achieve international agreement on cutting carbon emissions. That was achieved ~ at the cost of browbeating doubters and the Paris agreement struck in 2016 committed signatories to limit warming to 2°C above pre-industrial levels.

It couldn’t actually be done, the scientists said. To keep warming below 1.5°C, total emissions from 2015 onwards could not amount to more than 70 ~ gigatonnes of carbon – seven years’ worth at current emission rates.

Last week’s paper in Nature Geoscience recalculates that as 200 gigatonnes, or 240 gigatonnes if great efforts are also made to reduce other global warming gases such as nitrous oxide and methane.

So instead of seven years, we’ve got 20, or maybe 24. The task has gone from impossible to very difficult, said one of the paper’s authors, Joeri Rogelj.

Another author, Myles Allan of Oxford, told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

Allan’s defence of the models, however, was peculiar. He said that they had been assembled a decade ago, so it wasn’t surprising they had all deviated from reality. Yet these are the very same models used to make predictions for 50 or 100 years ahead which have saddled taxpayers with huge costs to pay -for alternative energy sources. Anybody who doubted their predictive power was labelled an unscientific dolt, a “climate denier” fit to be listed with the Flat Earthers.

As long as there have been computer models, there have been inaccurate forecasts. In the early 1970s the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, an extrapolation of population, pollution and resource depletion that concluded that the world was heading for imminent catastrophe. It sold more than 16m copies. I keep one on my shelves to remind me of the folly of Malthusian predictions.

Today the world is richer, cleaner and better fed than it was in 1972, while the club of Rome is forgotten. It still exits headquartered in Winterthur Switzerland, which must be nice.

The global-warming models are far more sophisticated than the Limits to Growth model, but that isn’t entirely a good thing, there is a paradox- in modelling: the more sophisticated the models become, the greater the uncertainty of the effects they predict.

As more parameters are added to the models – the rate at which ice falls through clouds, for example – the more uncertainties are added.

To reach its conclusions in the new paper, the team used actual temperatures today, which are 0.3°C lower than the models said they would be. That provides more headroom for carbon emissions before the 1.5°C target is reached. While the models’ error may seem small, it has big implications for future policy.

For one thing, it makes President Donald Trump’s rejection of the Paris agreement far less worrying. The US emits about 1.5 gigatonnes of carbon a year. Supposing Trump serves only a single term and in that time America reduces mitigation efforts, the effect is going to be insignificant when compared with the 200 gigatonnes the team estimates the world can afford to emit.

However, what the climate-change campaigners fear is that the acknowledgment of error will take the pressure off. Two of them, Lord Stern and Lord Krebs, wrote to The Times to try to head this off.

They argue that the errors do not mean that climate change isn’t happening. There were always uncertainties about its pace and magnitude, Krebs says – though you might not have thought so from the language often used and the efforts to deny airtime to those with doubts, such as Lord Lawson, the former chancellor.

Warming resumed in 2014. The climate warmers aren’t wrong, though a touch more humility would be appreciated.

 

Wall Street Journal Calls Merkel’s Energiewende “A Meltdown” Involving “Astronomical Costs”

By P Gosselin on 19. November 2017

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal here put out an accurate, concise assessment of how Germany’s “Energiewende” (transition away from fossil and nuclear energies over to green energies) has been faring so far. It’s grade? I’d interpret it as an F for failure.

Quickly turning into a huge embarrassment

Once seen as “a paragon of green energy virtue“, the Energiewende is nothing like it was sold to be by green energy hucksters. In fact things have gotten so bad that we can expect activists to grow totally silent on Germany’s Energiewende as its failure becomes glaring and embarrassing.

The WSJ editorial boards reminds readers that Germany is not even going to come close to meeting it’s 2020 or 2030 targets, despite the hundreds of billions of euros committed to the project so far.

No greenhouse gas reductions in 9 years

The truth is that the lion’s share of the country’s greenhouse gas reductions happened right after 1990 when free market principles were implemented to revamp totally run-down Communist East Germany. Yet since the mass state intervention that is the Energiewende, Germany’s reductions have ground to a halt. In reality the country — under Merkel’s leadership — has not seen its emissions of greenhouse gases fall since the end of the last decade, 2009! Read here.

“Astronomical costs”

By any measure this is an astonishing failure of Communist dimensions. The WSJ editorial board writes of “astronomical costs” in return for nothing.

By one estimate, businesses and households paid an extra €125 billion in increased electricity bills between 2000 and 2015 to subsidize renewables, on top of billions more in other handouts.

Zero impact

One the WSJ does not mention is that the latest estimates project the Energiewende to cost Germans more than 1.5 trillion euros by 2050. The aimed greenhouse gas reductions would translate into maybe a theoretical 2 hundredths of a degree Celsius of less global warning. And here it may surprise some that many experts believe the global warming theory is recklessly hyped. The reduced warming achieved may even be as puny as just a few thousandths of a degree.

This is hardly “saving the planet”.

Merkel flirts with the Greens

The WSJ correctly notes that “Germans join Danes in paying the highest household electricity rates in Europe, and German companies pay near the top among industrial users“. Moreover Germans are seeing their idyllic landscapes permanently scarred and ruined by industrial turbines protruding from forested hilltops nationwide.

And now as Merkel and her party wrangle to form a new coalition government with the Greens, the German chancellor is again flirting with even more disaster as she contemplates giving in to some of the Greens’ drastic demands, among them the rapid shutdown of Germany’s coal power plants and the banning of the registration of fossil fuel automobiles by 2030.

Barely scratching the surface

And although Germany’s wind and solar energy capacity could provide 30% of electricity needs, the lack of sun and the frequent windless days mean far less gets produced, and for now wind and solar are only able to provide a very tiny fraction of the country’s total primary energy needs. This means that despite all the investment, Germany is still only barely scratching the surface when it comes to going all green.

“”Voters in revolt”

The WSJ editorial board writes: “No wonder voters are in revolt” and: “A new study from the RWI Leibniz Institute for Economic Research finds that 61% of Germans wouldn’t want to pay even one eurocent more per kilowatt-hour of electricity to fund more renewables.”

The editorial board also indirectly accuses the German government of not being honest about the costs of green energies, and warns that we should expect “another voter rebellion in 2021” if Merkel “recommits to soaring energy costs and dirty-coal electricity“.

 

Renewable Energy Costs and Effectiveness in Germany

A comparison of both the Capital Cost and Energy Production Effectiveness of the Renewable Energy in Germany.

Germany has expended far more on its Energiewende for Renewable Energy installations than any other European Nation.

Click to access barobilan13-gb.pdf

Renewable Energy technologies

Onshore Wind power is the most effective form of Renewable Energy in capital cost terms. It is only costs ~9 times as much as conventional gas-fired power generation. On average across Europe Capacity / effectiveness is ~21%.

Offshore Wind power is about ~17 times more expensive to install but its increased capacity factors mean that it should be significantly more productive than Onshore installations.  Nonetheless as well as the significant additional capital costs, Offshore Wind power appears to have major problems with costlier long term maintenance and questionable reliability.

Large scale photovoltaic Solar power is proven to be the least economic Renewable Energy source costing about 34 times more in terms of capital costs, but it usually has reasonable maintenance costs.

On average, in Europe Solar PV  provides ~11% of its nameplate capacity, and even less in Germany.  As well as the impact of cloudy weather Photovoltaic units are susceptible to performance degradation from Ice or snow or obscuration with accumulating dust in drier climates.  Solar power might operate reasonably well at mid latitudes but it is inevitably a poor investment in Northern Europe where yields are low because of their latitude, the adverse weather, the seasons and the daily rotation of the earth.

The cost of the technical Photovoltaic elements of the systems are reducing, but these high-tech elements are becoming an ever smaller part of the final installation.  The costs of the support infrastructure and linkages to the grid are irreducible. It is also clear that the service life of solar cells is limited, degrading over time.  System degradation of the DC to AC inverters is particularly significant, they are an expensive element in any solar system with a limited operational life.

In Germany

The effectiveness of renewable energy installations  are compared to the cost and output capacity of conventional Gas Fired Electricity generation.

• capacity factor:  installed nameplate capacity compared to the actual electrical energy output achieved as published by European Renewable Energy industry statistics
• capital cost:  comparison with the cost of equivalent electrical output produced by Gas-Fired electrical generation as provided by US Government Energy Information Association 2013 report table 1.

The diagram below collates the cost and capacity factors of European Renewable Energy power sources, Onshore and Off-shore Wind Farms and Large scale Photovoltaic Solar generation.

At 37.9% of the total European commitment and at a capital cost of ~€200 billion Germany is the leader of Renewable Energy promotion and installation in Europe.  But comparatively its investment in Renewables has been both the most expensive and also the least efficient overall.  This is primarily because of its excessive commitment, more than 50% of its installed Renewables, to Solar Photovoltaic power.

Germany has made these investments in the expectation that that its “Energiewende, Energy Transition” policy would make the country a world leader in advances in Renewables.  This optimistic approach is not being justified.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/12/05/top-renewable-energy-expert-warns-of-collapsing-euro-energy-supply-germanys-energy-policy-suicidal/

http://notrickszone.com/2014/12/09/energiewende-takes-a-massive-blow-top-green-energy-proponent-concedes-blunder-with-ugly-consequences-huge-blow-to/

Onshore wind power in Germany accounts for ~35% of its massive Renewable investment but about half of its Renewable electricity output. German wind power operates at a relatively low level of capacity at ~18% or even less.

http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/07/germany-2014-report-card-is-in-its-25000-wind-turbines-get-an-f-averaged-only-14-8-of-rated-capacity/#sthash.yWCuzJda.dpbs

Unsurprisingly Germany has almost the highest installation of Renewables / head of the European population.

Large scale photovoltaics have cost some ~64% of Germany’s Renewable investment.

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/03/us-germany-renewables-idUSKBN0L719U20150203

But because of Germany northern latitude and its often cloudy skies, photovoltaics operate with a capacity factor a capacity factor of only ~9%. As a result overall Germany’s renewables operate at an overall capacity factor of less than 14%.

It seems incredible that Germany, a Nation with such great engineering and pragmatic prowess, could have become so convinced about Renewable Energy, especially the use of Solar Energy, to make such a grossly unwise investments.

http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/456961/reality-check-germany-does-not-get-half-its-energy-solar

http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/21/germanys-habitually-awol-green-energy-installed-windsolar-often-delivers-less-than-1-of-rated-capacity/

In addition Germany, by policy, is withdrawing from Nuclear electricity generation after the Fukushima tsunami. As a result Germany is now installing coal fired generating plant as rapidly as possible to maintain base load power. These new plants burn either lignite, (the most polluting type of coal and CO2 emissive fuel), or ordinary coal.  These plants have no facility for Carbon Capture and Storage, probably because German engineers have realised that CCS in operation is a costly engineering fallacy.

In spite of the fact that Renewable Energy output has grown about fourfold, there has actually been an overall increase of CO2 emissions from Germany since the year 2010. This is a result or rapid deployment of additional coal fired power station mainly using the most carbon intensive and toxic polluting energy source, brown coal.

Germany has invested very little, less than 1%, in Offshore Wind Power development and so far its experience has been poor, emphasising the technical difficulties of ever making large scale Offshore power fully operational.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/11/spiegel-germanys-large-scale-offshore-windpark-dream-morphs-into-an-engineering-and-cost-nightmare/

Even if large scale Offshore wind power in the North sea were eventually successful there is also a major question about the lack of suitable high capacity transmission lines across Germany from the North to its Southern industrial heartlands.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/05/giant-400-mw-bard-i-offshore-windpark-shut-down-extended-yet-again-delay-is-now-more-than-1-year/

http://www.thegwpf.com/vahrenholt-lecture/

In all the capital costs expended by 2013 in Europe amounted to some €1/2 trillion for ~170 Gigawatts of “nominal” installed Renewable Energy generation.  Germany has committed to about half of the expenditure.  But because of the reduced capacity factor, those installations provide ~30 Gigawatts of real output electrical power across Europe.  That output amounts to only about 2.9% of the total European generating capacity of 1024Gigawatts.

Intermittency and Non-dipatchability in Germany

In addition Renewable Energy, Wind and Solar power, electrical output is intermittent and non dispatchable. Their output cannot respond to electricity demand as and when needed.  Energy is contributed to the grid in a haphazard manner dependent on the weather, the time of day and the seasons.  A thorough and very detailed examination of the policy errors and vast expense to the UK in particular can be see at:

http://euanmearns.com/renewable-energy-the-most-expensive-policy-disaster-in-modern-british-history/#more-7697

The major problem with Wind and Solar Energy sources is that their electrical output is intermittent and non-dispatchable.  Renewable Energy electricity output is unable respond to electricity demand as and when needed.  Power is contributed to the grid in a haphazard manner dependent on the time of day, the season and the weather.

The variability of Renewable Energy combined with the “Renewables Obligation”, which mandates that the electricity grid must take high cost energy from Renewable sources preferentially, if available.

Such legislation can easily result in the demand on conventional generation in for example Germany varying widely by about 25 Gigawatts over short periods.  In addition it has the effect of making conventional uneconomic so that base load capacity is having to be shut down and lost from the grid.

This variable use of conventional power sources is inherently inefficient and results in wasteful use of conventional fuels and thus an unnecessary excess of CO2 emissions as back-up power must be available full time.

These extra inefficient emissions can easily exceed any of the CO2 savings made by the use Renewable Energy sources.

The following charts from “agora-energiewende” the show the magnitude of the problem of intermittency and non-dispatchability associated with Renewables in Germany and the UK.

http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/recent-electricity-data/stromerzeugung-und-verbrauch/

Typical 10 day charts for summer and winter in Germany:

Summer

Winter

The electricity output from wind power can equally be very variable. Electricity generation from wind turbines is fickle, as in the week in July 2014, clearly shown above, where Wind-Power input across Germany was close to zero for several days. Similarly an established high pressure system, with little wind over the whole of Northern Europe is a common occurrence in winter months, when electricity demand is at its highest.

In Germany, its massive commitment to solar energy can briefly provide up to ~20% of country wide demand for a few hours either side of noon on some fine summer days as can be seen in the graph above.  But at the time of maximum power demand on winter evenings Solar energy grid input is nil of necessity.  But Solar energy has absorbed ~65% of total German Renewable investment.

In the Summer example in July 2014 Wind Power input varied from 15.5 GW to 0.18 GW and the Solar contribution varied from nil to some 15 GW.

Germany has similar insolation and cloudiness characteristics as Alaska and the UK being even further North has an even worse solar energy performance.  Solar power inevitably varies according to the time of day, the state of the weather and also of course radically with the seasons. Solar power works most effectively in latitudes nearer the equator and it certainly cannot be seriously effective and useful full time in Northern Europe.

Conversely, on some occasions Renewable Energy output may be in excess of demand and this has to dumped expensively and unproductively.  This is especially so, as there is still no viable and cost effective solution to electrical energy storage on an industrial scale.

Conclusion

The following graphic shows the comparatively poor performance of all Renewable Energy in Germany as opposed to other major committed nations in Europe.

The Holocene context for Anthropogenic Global warming

Summary

Our current beneficial, warm Holocene interglacial has been the enabler of mankind’s civilisation for the last 10,000 years. The congenial climate of the Holocene epoch spans from mankind’s earliest farming to the scientific and technological advances of the last 100 years.

However all the Northern Hemisphere Ice Core records  from Greenland show:

• the last millennium 1000AD – 2000AD has been the coldest millennium of the entire Holocene interglacial.
• each of the notable high points in the Holocene temperature record, (Holocene Climate Optimum – Minoan – Roman – Medieval – Modern), have been progressively colder than the previous high point.
• for its first 7-8000 years the early Holocene, including its high point “climate optimum”, had virtually  flat temperatures, an average drop of only ~0.007 °C per millennium.
• but the more recent Holocene, since a “tipping point” at ~1000BC, has seen a temperature diminution at more than 20 times that earlier rate at about 0.14 °C per millennium.
• the Holocene interglacial is already 10 – 11,000 years old and judging from the length of previous interglacials the Holocene epoch should be drawing to its close: in this century, the next century or this millennium.
• the beneficial warming at the end of the 20th century to the Modern high point has been transmuted into the “Great Man-made Global Warming Alarm”.
• eventually this late 20th century temperature blip will come to be seen as just noise in the system in the longer term progress of comparatively rapid cooling over the last 3000+ years.
• other published Greenland Ice Core records as well as GISP2, (NGRIP1, GRIP) corroborate this finding. They also exhibit the same pattern of a prolonged relatively stable early Holocene period followed by a subsequent much more rapid decline in the more recent past.

When considering the scale of temperature changes that alarmists anticipate because of Man-made Global Warming and their view of the disastrous effects of additional Man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions in this century, it is useful to look at climate change from a longer term, century by century and even on a millennial perspective.

The much vaunted and much feared “fatal” tipping point of +2°C would only bring Global temperatures close to the level of the very congenial climate of “the Roman warm period”.

If it were possible to reach the “horrendous” level of +4°C postulated by Warmists, that extreme level of warming would still only bring temperatures to about the level of the previous Eemian maximum, a warm and abundant epoch, when hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta.

For a more comprehensive view of the decline of the Holocene see:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/29/climate-and-human-civilization-over-the-last-18000-years-2/

The Recent Geological Context

The Antarctic Vostok and EPICA ice core records, using the δ¹⁸Oxygen temperature assessment technique, show that

• there have been regular fluctuations at about 100,000 year intervals over the past 800,000 years
• there have been 5 probably warmer interglacial periods in the last 450,000 years
• interglacial periods have varied both in temperature intensity and duration.

On occasions some earlier interglacial periods were significantly shorter than the 10,000 year norm.

The Antarctic based EPICA and Vostok Ice Cores above mostly show good accord for the last 200,000 years.  Earlier there seems to be a similar pattern but with some significant time displacement in the period between 200,000 and 450,000 years ago.  Those two Antarctic records are not so well coordinated during the recent Holocene period.

This repeating pattern of long periods of glaciation, (~100,000 years), when much of the Northern hemisphere is covered by ices sheets several kilometres deep. These are  followed by much shorter warmer inter-glacial periods, (~10,000 years), is driven by the orbital geometry of the earth around the sun.  It can be modulated by the shorter term periodic behaviour of the sun.  These facts controlling the earth’s climate are well documented and well understood.

Prior to the current Holocene epoch a period of deep, encroaching, glaciation had persisted for the previous 100,000+ years as shown by the four Greenland records.

Such long periods of glaciation meant that a mile high ice sheet covered New York as well as much of the currently inhabited Northern hemisphere.

Those glacial conditions can and will return.

On past experience, at about 11,000 years the Holocene interglacial must be approaching its reversion back to a long period of full glaciation.

That ~110,000 year long period of glaciation was preceded by the Eemian interglacial period.  The Eemian epoch was at its warmest about 120,000 years ago.  It was some +3°C warmer on average than the Holocene “Climate Optimum”, of just some ~8000 years ago.

The Eemian interglacial had a much higher peak but lasted about same length of time as the current Holocene.  The current Holocene epoch has had significantly lower temperatures and has had a less exaggerated temperature peak than that of the Eemian interglacial.

The GRIP Greenland Ice Core record in the Northern Hemisphere also clearly shows the onset of the Holocene interglacial and the onset is well coordinated with the Vostok and EPICA Antarctic records.

So based on this pattern of radical climate change our current benign Holocene interglacial could well, our rather should be drawing towards its close.

The temperature profile of our Holocene Epoch

The Northern Hemisphere GISP2 Greenland Ice Core data gives this well accepted detailed profile of our current Holocene Epoch.

According to longer term Northern Hemisphere Greenland GRIP ice core records, the last millennium 1000 – 2000 AD has been the coldest millennium of the current Holocene epoch, with millennial average temperatures about 1.8°C lower than its early “Holocene climate optimum” in about 7-6000 BC.

There has since been a comparatively minor temperature recovery since the Little Ice Age some 2-300 years ago.

However, it is this limited recovery in temperature that has recently given rise to the “Great Global Warming Scare”.

The overall millennial difference during the Holocene since ~8000BC has in total been a cooling of ~-0.9°C.

The bulk of that temperature loss ~-0.4°C has been in the last 3 millennia since 1000BC.

The temperature progress of the current Holocene interglacial epoch for the last 10,000 years is interesting as a backdrop or gauge for all the recent Warmist and Alarmist predictions that have been developing over the last 40 – 50 years.

The Holocene interglacial can be looked at in two phases:

1. the early Holocene, encompassing its highest “Climate Optimum”, was relatively stable at the millennial level showing only a modest cooling of about 0.007°C per millennium from about 8000BC up until about 1000BC.
2. thereafter the more recent 3000 year phase 1000BC – 2000AD shows much more rapid cooling at a rate of 0.137°C per millennium, (i.e. at about twenty times the earlier rate).

This millennial analysis of the GRIP record is reinforced by the profiles of other Northern Hemisphere ice core records, on millennial scales as shown below.  These other millennial profiles show even steeper declines than the GISP2 record.

Judging from the lengths of past interglacial periods, after some 10,000 – 11,000 years the Holocene epoch should now be drawing to its close.

A climate reversion in to a full, encroaching, glaciation is therefore foreseeable, if not overdue, in this century, the next century, or this millennium.

So the most recent 3 millennia have experienced accelerated cooling.  A continued natural climate change towards a colder climate is now more rather than less likely. 

Cooling will lead to more intense and adverse weather.  There is good reason to expect this, simply because the overall energy differential between the poles and the tropics can only be greater with cooling and that in itself would lead to less stable conditions in the atmosphere.

In addition to more adverse weather, any coming cooling will also lead to very serious deprivation for mankind and the biosphere as a whole.  Growing seasons will shorten and less arable land will be capable of crop production.  

There is clear evidence of this form of detrimental climate change with the cooling during the Little Ice Age.  In Europe that was a time of great pestilence, social upheaval and failure of civilised settlements, for example in Greenland, due to that adverse colder climate change.  A further contemporary example was the demise of the Ankor Wat civilisation in Cambodia, which occurred from the drier cooler climate of the Little Ice Age.

But during the last two centuries the world has been recovering from these adverse conditions and the marginal rise in temperature the late 20th century has been wholly beneficial for mankind and the biosphere.

The present UK temperature context

As global temperatures have already been showing stagnation or cooling over the last nineteen years or more, the temperature record can be brought up to date with local UK temperature information .

The UK’s own long established temperature record is the UK Meteorological Office Central England Temperature record.  Since the year 2000 it shows a significant cooling trend at -0.0193°C/year or a decline of about ~ -0.3°C in the last 16 years with colder temperatures both in spring and in summer.

Alarmists always consider that their view of a warming trend will continue indefinitely.  However were this UK Met office trend to continue to 2100, the result would be a cooling of almost -2.0°C by the end of the century:  that would certainly be entering Little Ice Age Territory or worse.

But in the period since the year 2000, according to data released by BP, an additional ~2/3 of the cumulative CO2 Man-made emissions since 1965 have been released.

When rescaled to exclude the seasonal temperature excursions, the recent annual UK declining trend becomes more obvious.

The question must be asked,

is this what the beginning of a reversion to a Little Ice Age looks like?

Especially with the present reducing Solar activity, significantly reduced temperatures, at least to the level of another Little Ice Age are already predicted for later this century.

Current Alarm

But all current Climate Change discussions and alarmist propaganda only concentrate on short term temperature variations since about 1850, (the recovery from the Little Ice Age).  Often these are dependent on  very minor, short term temperature increases. These always try to emphasise ever increasing global temperatures.  They are often presented as disaster but they are only measured in virtually undetectable one hundredths of a degree Centigrade.

The predictions of Catastrophic Global Warming by alarmists should be set in the context of the temperature picture of the current Holocene interglacial.  When the predictions of Global warming alarmists are seen in the overall context of the Holocene epoch the much vaunted and much feared “fatal” tipping point of +2°C can be seen to only bring Global temperatures to the level of the very congenial and productive “Roman warm period”.  And that further rise of +2°C could only bring positive economic benefits to the bulk of man-kind especially in the Northern hemisphere.

Catastrophic Global Warming alarmists postulate that temperature rise will reach the “potentially horrendous” level, (in their view), of +4°C by from the inclusion of major positive feedbacks from additional water vapor in the atmosphere.  Even so the +4°C temperature level would still only bring global temperatures only up to about the level of the previous Eemian maximum.

The Eemian interglacial ~120,000 years ago, was a warm and very plentiful period in the world’s history:  hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta.  As on-land ice sheets receded substantially in the Eemian, the resulting sea levels were about 3 meters higher than at present.  But the ice sheet disintegration process to achieve that would have taken several millennia to have been fulfilled.

However according to the Alarmists all their radical and destructive consequences of temperature increases are supposed to occur over in this century 2000 – 2100AD. And according to them this “overheating catastrophe” will be solely attributable to Man-kind’s burning of fossil fuels and emission of extra Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere.

Excess CO2 from burning fossil fuel was certainly not the cause of the much higher Eemian peak ~120,000 years ago.

 

But over the past ~20 years: 

• Man-made Co2 emissions have risen by ~14%
• CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by almost ~8%

and there has been no perceptible increase in Global temperature. 

Global Warming Alarmists including:

• the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• the United Nations
• many Western Governments
• Green NGOs, etc.

aggressively assert absolute catastrophe from excessive Man-made temperature rises.

It is extreme arrogance to expect that the actions of mankind could ever achieve a complete reversal of the world’s climatic cooling progress of the last 3000 years and in addition achieve a positive +4°C change over the course of the current century.

When the postulated warming in the coming century as promoted by the IPCC and other Global Warming alarmists is collated against the progress of actual Holocene temperatures, the absolute implausibility of the Man-made Global Warming hypothesis by adding comparatively marginal amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere becomes obvious.

Global warming protagonists should accept that our Holocene interglacial

• has been in a long-term decline
• that decline has accelerated over the last 3000 years and
• that any action taken by Man-kind is unlikely to make any difference whatsoever.

Were the actions by Man-kind able to avert any warming they would eventually just reinforce the catastrophic cooling that is bound to return very soon in geological time scales.

References

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/indexice.html

Charting the costs and effectiveness of Renewable Energy in Europe

A comparison of both the Capital Cost and Energy Production Effectiveness of the Renewable Energy in Europe.

The diagrams below collate the cost and capacity factors of European Renewable Energy power sources, Onshore and Off-shore Wind Farms and Large scale Photovoltaic Solar generation.  They are compared to the cost and output capacity of conventional Gas Fired Electricity generation.

• capacity factor:  installed nameplate capacity compared to the actual electrical energy output achieved
• capital cost:  comparison with the cost of equivalent electrical output produced by Gas Fired electrical generation.

Overall European renewable Energy has almost 6 times lower capacity than conventional Gas Fired power generation and it costs about 16 times more in capital expenditure alone.

In all the capital costs expended by 2013 in Europe amounted to some €1/2 trillion for ~170 Gigawatts of “nominal” installed Renewable Energy generation.  But because of the reduced capacity factor, those installations provide ~30 Gigawatts of real output electrical power.  That output amounts to only about 2.9% of the total European generating capacity of 1024Gigawatts (1).

In addition Renewable Energy, Wind and Solar power, electrical output is intermittent and non dispatchable. Their output cannot respond to electricity demand as and when needed.  Energy is contributed to the grid in a haphazard manner dependent on the weather, the time of day and the seasons.  A thorough and very detailed examination of the policy errors and vast expense to the UK in particular can be see at:

http://euanmearns.com/renewable-energy-the-most-expensive-policy-disaster-in-modern-british-history/#more-7697

Renewable Energy technologies

Onshore Wind power is the most effective form of Renewable Energy in capital cost terms. It is only costs ~9 times as much as conventional power generation. On average across Europe Capacity / effectiveness is ~21%.

Offshore Wind power is about ~17 times more expensive to install but its increased capacity factors mean that it should be significantly more productive than Onshore installations.

Nonetheless as well as the significant additional capital costs, Offshore Wind power appears to have major problems with costlier long term maintenance and questionable reliability (4).

Large scale photovoltaic Solar power is proven to be the least economic Renewable Energy source costing about 34 times more in terms of capital costs, but it usually has reasonable maintenance costs.

On average, in Europe Solar PV  provides ~11% of its nameplate capacity.

As well as the impact of cloudy weather Photovoltaic units are susceptible to performance degradation from Ice or snow or obscuration with accumulating dust in drier climates.

Solar power might operate reasonably well at mid latitudes but it is inevitably a poor investment in Northern Europe where yields are low because of their latitude, the adverse weather, the seasons and the daily rotation of the earth.

The cost of the technical Photovoltaic elements of the systems are reducing, but these high-tech elements are becoming an ever smaller part of the final installation.  The costs of the support infrastructure and linkages to the grid are irreducible. It is also clear that the service life of solar cells is limited, degrading over time.

System degradation of the DC to AC inverters is particularly significant, they are an expensive element in any solar system with a limited operational life.

An analogy for the Nationally mandated use of Renewable Energy.

By law a family has to purchase two cars, one works well all the time, is cheap to buy, is cheap to maintain and does not cost too much to run but the other is very expensive to buy and only works about 1/6th of the time although the fuel costs very little.  But by law the family is forced to use the expensive car if it is working even though it may well let them down at any time.  At the same time the cheap car must be kept ticking over using fuel but going nowhere in case the expensive car stops.

Renewable installations by committed European Nations (1)

Major commitments to Renewable Energy in Europe have been made by 15 Nations accounting in total for more than 95% of all European installations.

The mix of major Renewable Energy types in Europe is as follows.

And the extent of renewable installation measured in Megawatts / million head of population in each European nation is shown, with Denmark unsurprisingly just leading with the most intense usage.  Denmark is closely followed by the vast commitments made in Germany.

Of these 15 nations only 5 have made the major commitments amounting to more than 80% of all European Renewable Energy installations.

These are:

• Germany   37.9%
• Spain   16.2%
• Italy 14.5%
• France   6.9%
• United Kingdom 6.5%.
• Denmark 2.7%

Comparative Calculations

Capacity calculations are straightforward. Published figures from the 2013 version of “The State of Renewable Energies in Europe: EurOberv’ER Report”(1), give the installed base of Renewables Name Plate capacity in Megawatts by country and also their total annual energy output recorded in Gigawatt hours.

The report (1) does not include an output value for Offshore Wind power so an arbitrary but high end value of 30% capacity is used in these calculations.

Annual Gigawatt hours output can be translated to equivalent Megawatts of installed capacity by accounting for the 8760, (365 * 24), hours in the year (2). The reported output over the year converted to equivalent installed Megawatts of conventional generation capacity is then compared with the installed Nameplate capacity to give the capacity rating.

A yardstick of comparative capital costs, quoted in US$, but nonetheless useable for comparative purposes, is provided in the recent US Government Energy Information Association 2013 report table 1 (3).  It gives “Overnight Capital Costs” / Gigawatt for each type of Renewable and Conventional Energy. In addition the table also gives comparative values for Operation and Maintenance, including fuel costs, for each type of generation.

The base for these comparisons is Gas fired power generation costing about €1,000,000,000/Gigawatt

“Overnight Capital Cost” is the standard comparative measure for capital costs used in energy industries. The specific Overnight Capital Costs used include:

• Civil and structural costs
• Mechanical equipment supply and installation
• Electrical and instrumentation and control
• Project indirect costs
• Other owners costs: design studies, legal fees, insurance costs, property taxes and local electrical linkages to the Grid.

However and very importantly “Overnight Capital Costs” specifically do not include:

• Remote access costs, which for Renewable Energy in many cases will be very onerous
• Extended electrical linkages to the Grid from remote locations.
• Provision of Back-up power supply, “spinning reserve” for times when renewable power is unavailable.
• Fuel costs for actual generation and the spinning reserve.
• Maintenance, including electrical input necessary sustain wind turbines when idle.
• Financing   etc.

These further costs, excluded from “Overnight Capital Costs”, mean that the additional capital commitment for Renewable Energy is certainly significantly more than the simple capital cost comparisons presented here.

Intermittency and Non-dipatchability

The major problem with Wind and Solar Energy sources is that their electrical output is intermittent and non-dispatchable.

Renewable Energy electricity output is unable respond to electricity demand as and when needed.  Power is contributed to the grid in a haphazard manner dependent on the time of day, the season and the weather.

The variability of Renewable Energy combined with the “Renewables Obligation”, which mandates that the electricity grid must take high cost energy from Renewable sources preferentially, if available.

Such legislation can easily result in the demand on conventional generation in for example Germany varying widely by about 25 Gigawatts over short periods.  In addition it has the effect of making conventional uneconomic so that base load capacity is having to be shut down and lost from the grid.

This variable use of conventional power sources is inherently inefficient and results in wasteful use of conventional fuels and thus an unnecessary excess of CO2 emissions as back-up power must be available full time.

These extra inefficiency emissions can easily exceed any of the CO2 savings made by the use Renewable Energy sources.

The following charts from “agora-energiewende” the show the magnitude of the problem of intermittency and non-dispatchability associated with Renewables in Germany and the UK (5) (6).

Typical 10 day charts for summer and winter in Germany:

The electricity output from wind power can equally be very variable. Electricity generation from wind turbines is fickle, as in the week in July 2014, clearly shown above, where Wind-Power input across Germany was close to zero for several days. Similarly an established high pressure system, with little wind over the whole of Northern Europe is a common occurrence in winter months, when electricity demand is at its highest.

In Germany, its massive commitment to solar energy can briefly provide up to ~20% of country wide demand for a few hours either side of noon on some fine summer days as can be seen in the graph above.

But at the time of maximum power demand on winter evenings Solar energy grid input is nil of necessity.  But Solar energy has absorbed ~65% of total German Renewable investment.

In the Summer example in July 2014 Wind Power input varied from 15.5 GW to 0.18 GW and the Solar contribution varied from nil to some 15 GW.

Germany has similar insolation and cloudiness characteristics as Alaska and the UK being even further North has an even worse solar energy performance.

Solar power inevitably varies according to the time of day, the state of the weather and also of course radically with the seasons. Solar power works most effectively in latitudes nearer the equator and it certainly cannot be seriously effective and useful full time in Northern Europe.

A further UK example of the failure of Renewable Energy at a time of peak electricity demand is shown below, the ~11Gigawatt Wind Power fleet contributed just 0.19GW for the actual demand of 53.5GW, or only 0.36% (7).  Electrical input from the UK Solar power installations in the same period was nil.

Conversely, on occasions Renewable Energy output may be in excess of demand and this has to dumped expensively and unproductively.  This is especially so, as there is still no viable and cost effective solution to electrical energy storage on an industrial scale.

It is for this reason that the word “nominally” is used throughout these notes in relation to the name plate capacity outputs from Renewable Energy sources.

Renewable Energy performance in five European Nations with major commitments

Germany

At 37.9% of the total European commitment and at a capital cost of ~€200 billion Germany is the leader of Renewable Energy promotion and installation in Europe.

But comparatively its investment in Renewables has been both the most expensive and also the least efficient overall. This is primarily because of its excessive commitment, more than 50% of its installed Renewables, to Solar Photovoltaic power.

Germany has made these investments in the expectation that that its “Energiewende Energy Transition” policy would make the country a world leader in advances in Renewables.

This optimistic approach is not being justified (9) (10).

Onshore wind power in Germany accounts for ~35% of its massive Renewable investment but about half of its Renewable electricity output. German wind power operates at a relatively low level of capacity at ~18% or even less (17). Unsurprisingly Germany has almost the highest installation of Renewables / head of the European population.

Large scale photovoltaics have cost some ~64% of Germany’s Renewable investment (16). But because of Germany northern latitude and its often cloudy skies, photovoltaics operate with a capacity factor a capacity factor of only ~9%. As a result overall Germany’s renewables operate at an overall capacity factor of less than 14%.

It seems incredible that Germany, a Nation with such great engineering and pragmatic prowess, could have become so convinced about Renewable Energy especially the use of Solar Energy (13) (14) to make such a grossly unwise investments.

In addition Germany, by policy, is withdrawing from Nuclear electricity generation after the Fukushima tsunami. As a result Germany is now installing coal fired generating plant as rapidly as possible to maintain base load power. These new plants burn either lignite, (the most polluting type of coal and CO2 emissive fuel), or ordinary coal.

These plants have no facility for Carbon Capture and Storage, probably because German engineers have realised that CCS in operation is a costly engineering fallacy.

Note: Were it to work at all, Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS, can be viewed as a costly way to throw away comparatively miniscule amounts of useful plant food.

In spite of the fact that Renewable Energy output has grown about fourfold, there has been an overall increase of CO2 emissions from Germany since the year 2010, see graph of emissions / head under France later.

Germany has invested very little, less than 1%, in Offshore Wind Power development and so far its experience has been poor (11), emphasising the technical difficulties of ever making large scale Offshore power fully operational.

Even if large scale Offshore wind power in the North sea were eventually successful there is also a major question about the lack of suitable high capacity transmission lines across Germany from the North to its Southern industrial heartlands (12).

Spain

Spain has made the second largest commitment to Renewable Energy in Europe at ~16% of the European installation in total. Even though Spain has a southerly position in Europe, unlike Germany,  it has invested in a preponderance of Wind power, (~75%), rather than Solar power.

Renewables subsidies have been a significant contributor to the Spanish financial crisis and that they are now being cut back substantially.

In spite of its long coastline Spain has not invested in Offshore Wind Power.

Italy

At ~14.5% of the European total Italy has made the third largest commitment to Renewable Energy in Europe.

Not unreasonably with its southerly location this investment is largely in Solar power ~68%.

It is believed that Renewable Energy subsidies are contributing to the poor financial position of the country. Renewables in Italy are close to being the least cost effective in Europe.

In spite of its long coastline Italy has not invested in Offshore Wind Power.

France

At 6.9% France has made a significant commitment to Renewable Energy, with about 65% allocated to wind Power.

France already has a lower CO2 output / head than China, (currently at ~75%, less), because of its 85% commitment to Nuclear power electricity generation.

So investment in Renewable Energy would seem to be an entirely pointless exercise as it is unlikely to reduce CO2 output any further.

The French CO2 output level / head at 5.50 tonnes/head is rapidly approaching the world-wide average at 4.9 tonnes/head (8).

In spite of its long coastline France has not invested in Offshore Wind Power.

United Kingdom

At 6.3% of European installations the UK still only has a comparatively moderate commitment to Renewable Energy so far.  But because of the legal obligations made in the 2008 Climate Change Act, this investment is expected to grow substantially, unless the Act is repealed.

The UK has encountered substantial resistance to on-shore Wind Power and has committed ~30% of its capacity and ~50% of its cost to investments offshore.  These high cost installations are subject to the future reliability and maintenance problems of all off-shore wind generation (4).

Solar power is only ~17% of the UK investment and has a low capacity factor of ~8%.

In 2013 The UK was close to the Chinese emissions / head of ~ 7 tonnes / head / annum.

Denmark

Denmark renewable installations are only 2.7% of the European total, so in terms of total installations it is a minor player.

But as a pioneer, with major industrial commitment to wind power, it has the highest installed base of Renewables per head (15).

Its Wind Power capacity record at 28% is the highest in Europe as opposed to the European average of ~22%.

Nonetheless Danish Renewable Energy is insignificant in saving CO2 emissions, being only 0.13% of current (2013) World CO2 emissions and only 1.14% of total EU emissions.

For its size, Denmark has also invested substantially in Offshore Wind Power.

Some Conclusions

European nations have already committed massive investments to Renewable Energy, Wind and Solar power.

According to Renewable Energy industry sources, conservatively in capital costs alone, this amounts to at least ~€0.5 trillion but this only provides ~2.9% of European Generating capacity.

Renewable Energy installation costs are about 16 times greater than comparable Gas Fired generation.  

By 2013 his investment has resulted an installed Nameplate Capacity of ~169Gigawatts which is capable of producing a “nominal” ~30Gigawatts of electrical Generating Capacity in reality, that is 17.5% of the its nameplate capacity.

As is well proven in France, the most effective way of controlling and reducing CO2 emissions, if it were needed, is by using Nuclear power for electricity generation. CO2 emissions per head in France now stand at ~75% of those in China for the whole Chinese population of 1.4 billion.

At the resulting price €16.87 billion/Gigawatt for Renewable Energy, replacement of the 1024GW European Generating fleet would cost about €17.3trillion, a sum close to the whole annual GDP of the European Union.  This capital sum should be compared to an approximate cost of about €1trillion for the replacement of the whole European generating capacity by conventional generation capacity. 

But the “nominal” 30GW of Renewable Energy production is not really as useful as one would wish, because of its production is intermittent and non-dispatchable.  

These uneconomic investments have been promoted and supported by government subsidies and other artificial government market manipulation.  

Without its government subsidy structure Renewable Energy would not be financially viable as a source of electrical energy.

But the expense of those policies has been loaded mainly on the electrical bills of Electricity customers, private individuals or industry:

these policies have already caused very substantial hardship to poorer individuals in European society

these policies are severely damaging the competitiveness of European industries.

References

(1)  http://www.energies-renouvelables.org/observ-er/stat_baro/barobilan/barobilan13-gb.pdf

(2)  Prof David MacKay in “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”, page 334

(3)  http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/pdf/updated_capcost.pdf

(4)  http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/11/spiegel-germanys-large-scale-offshore-windpark-dream-morphs-into-an-engineering-and-cost-nightmare/

(5) http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/recent-electricity-data/stromerzeugung-und-verbrauch/

(6) http://www.ukpowergeneration.info

(7)  http://euanmearns.com/uk-hits-minus-13˚c-and-wind-hits-zero-output/

(8)  https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/the-record-of-recent-man-made-co2-emissions-1965-2013/

(9) http://notrickszone.com/2014/12/05/top-renewable-energy-expert-warns-of-collapsing-euro-energy-supply-germanys-energy-policy-suicidal/

(10) http://notrickszone.com/2014/12/09/energiewende-takes-a-massive-blow-top-green-energy-proponent-concedes-blunder-with-ugly-consequences-huge-blow-to/

(11) http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/05/giant-400-mw-bard-i-offshore-windpark-shut-down-extended-yet-again-delay-is-now-more-than-1-year/

(12)  http://www.thegwpf.com/vahrenholt-lecture/

(13)  http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/456961/reality-check-germany-does-not-get-half-its-energy-solar

(14)  http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/21/germanys-habitually-awol-green-energy-installed-windsolar-often-delivers-less-than-1-of-rated-capacity/

(15)  http://euanmearns.com/wind-power-denmark-and-the-island-of-denmark/

(16)  http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/03/us-germany-renewables-idUSKBN0L719U20150203

(17)  http://notrickszone.com/2015/02/07/germany-2014-report-card-is-in-its-25000-wind-turbines-get-an-f-averaged-only-14-8-of-rated-capacity/#sthash.yWCuzJda.dpbs

https://edmhdotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/screen-shot-2014-09-15-at-07-24-34.png?w=804&h=480

https://edmhdotme.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/screen-shot-2014-09-12-at-12-32-50.png?w=625&h=375

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk

Some Official Adjustments to Temperature Records Worldwide

Accumulating consistent long-term temperature measurements at ground level is much more difficult than it might seem. Static ground based weather stations are very susceptible to changes in their local environment as land use changes around them and also to their being poorly maintained. Because of the Urban Heat Island Effect, caused by the local environment, a large city like London can be as much as 4-9°C warmer than its surrounding countryside. Many of the ground-based thermometers now in use were originally installed at airports, when they were only green fields, now they are massive developments. The chart above shows the longest, (1659 to date), unadjusted continuous temperature record from Central England. It has been extended further in to the past by the research efforts of Tony Brown of Climate reason.  The record clearly implies that there has been some modest warming over the last centuries as the world has recovered from the Little Ice Age.  In addition the older extension provided by Tony Brown is usefully beginning to show higher temperatures towards the end of the Medieval Warm Period.

By way of example of the official adjustments being made to the land based temperature record, consideration is given here to a single correctly sited and continuously well-maintained, rural US weather station is situated at Dale Enterprise West Virginia.  Its records are instructive. The un-adulterated record even shows modest cooling of 0.29°C per century, if all other adjustments made by “climate scientists” are ignored.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/26/contribution-of-ushcn-and-giss-bias-in-long-term-temperature-records-for-a-well-sited-rural-weather-station/

However as is shown above the NASA GISS published “value added” temperatures for this same location. This shows a massive adjustment lowering of past temperatures before 1965 to give the impression of very substantial (+0.78ºC / century) warming at this station.  Of particular interest is the apparent step wise adjustment of the homogenised data, which would seem to be truly spurious.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ushcn/v2/monthly/menne-etal2009.pdf

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/26/contribution-of-ushcn-and-giss-bias-in-long-term-temperature-records-for-a-well-sited-rural-weather-station/

Cumulatively the result has been to emphasise warming from the US rural data sets by some 0.47ºC / century. These results are always a one-way street to emphasise the apparent amount of warming. The following table clearly shows the scale and impact of the overall adjustments in the USA.  However this adjustment effect has not been confined to the USA. This type of manipulation of the data throughout all the rural data sets to show apparent warming seems to be an entirely common occurrence within the organisations that are the official guardians of the data.

Those National organisations should be above reproach in their scientific integrity.

In addition many rural and more northerly measuring stations were totally lost with the fall of the USSR. But since then many others still in operation have been deliberately ignored by the UK Meteorological Office, the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University and NASA GISS in producing their global data sets. Thus the number of stations being considered have been radically reduced, for example by omitting information from Russia particularly from more northerly and rural stations. The impact of the deliberate loss of these many mainly rural stations on measured temperatures can be seen below. The graph below shows the divergence between well-sited rural US weather stations and weather stations that are increasingly susceptible to the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI). It should also be noted that Phil Jones at East Anglia CRU has also published papers explicitly discounting the Urban Heat Island effect.

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/cru-3b-urban-warm-bias-in-ghcn/

In addition the adjustments made by these official promoters of the man-made global warming assertion has been progressive.  This effect can be seen in the graphs of presentation of three different versions of global temperature produced by NASA GISS between 1980 and 2007. The promoters of this data set are now proclaiming that 2010 will be the warmest year on record. This is hardly surprising, if they have adjusted the past downwards and the present upwards. One can only conclude that if only well maintained and well sited rural stations were considered so as to avoid the Urban Heat Island Effect entirely and if the adjustments made by climate scientists devoted to the Man-Made Global Warming assertion were ignored that reports of the warming of the earth from ground based measurements would be much reduced.

But it is the protagonists of the Global Warming assertion who are also the official custodians of the data.

Global assessments of world surface temperature are made by combining temperature data from worldwide sources such as the adjusted one at Dale Enterprise Virginia. Sadly the un-auditable re-adjustment of temperature history by the official custodians of the data has become a phenomenon throughout the Western world. Recently it has become clear that many unwarranted adjustments always showing additional warming have been consistently made to the four main sources of accredited global temperature records. Some examples of such adjustments throughout the Western world include:

• USA: NASA GISS, (previously lead by the extreme Warmist advocate, James Hansen), have admitted errors and revised their data set downwards. It appears that in being determined to announce that 2010 is/was the warmest year ever, they have ignored available data stations in the Canadian and Siberian Arctic using only fabricated data, extrapolated from warmer measurement stations further south. They have also reduced the levels in their historic records for last century thus enhancing the appearance of Global warming. It is now slowly becoming clear that the satellite data provided by NOAA has also been comprehensively corrupted with over estimates and some quite ridiculous readings of temperature, (several hundred °F in the great lakes area), over a period of several years. This data has been distributed worldwide as the foundation of many climate models supporting the Man-made Global warming assertion. It may now be the subject of legal challenge.
• Russia: only 40% of the now limited available readings were used by the collators of temperature data always favouring warmer urban sites.
• Canada, many northern sites are now ignored in the collation of temperature data for the IPCC.
• UK: the evidence that both the UK Meteorological office and the East Anglia University Climatic Research Unit have made unwarranted upward adjustments to the data they publish to support the scientific case of the UN IPCC is clear from the release of data and e-mail correspondence in “Climategate”: eliminating data to “hide the decline”.

In a flagrant contradiction of normal scientific method University of East Anglia have admitted that they have destroyed the original records so their adjustment processes cannot be re-audited and reproduced in retrospect.

• Australia: another single example, one amongst many in Australia, from the data for Darwin in the Northern Territories makes the point about unwarranted adjustments made by NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network.

That shows how to turn records of -0.7°C cooling/century into 1.2°C warming/century with unexplained, and un-auditable adjustments.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/

It is certainly now clear that the Australian Government central research facility, the CSIRO, is wholly committed to the “Warmist” doctrine and supports it on behalf of their Federal Government.

• New Zealand: the following table shows the unexplained differences between recorded data and data published by the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) for several locations.

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/05/crisis-in-new-zealand-climatology

The following graph shows the extent of the downward adjustments of past readings over time made in New Zealand.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/

Click to access niwa.ct.docs.pdf

These results are now the subject of a challenge in the New Zealand High Court. As a result of the challenge the New Zealand government agency have now accepted that their records had been falsified deliberately as a result of the political pressure upon them. So there is a chance that in future other National records may also be subject to legal challenge. So it seems to have become common practice for national Meteorological Services worldwide to make these sorts of upward adjustments in the present and downward adjustments in the past, always with the intention of showing increased warming of their regions of the planet.

http://wallstreetpit.com/20710-climategate-goes-back-to-1980

A suspicious mind one would consider that these sorts of adjustments were as a result of a coordinated international intergovernmental programme or at least well co-ordinated “groupthink”.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/25/do-we-care-if-2010-is-the-warmist-year-in-history/

Having progressively adjusted upwards / “added value” to the basic ground based data sets, the final assessment of global temperature is then combined from this information and additional data is fabricated for the blank areas by interpolating intermediate temperatures over a grid for the huge territories where measuring stations do not exist. As a result it is hardly surprising that the published record used by the UN IPCC authorities shows significant worldwide warming.

Accordingly the quality of the record becomes questionable and entirely unverifiable in retrospect. Sceptics would certainly think that this was entirely intentional outcome. But it is on these bases that claims are made and officially published of the “warmest year ever” and the “warmest decade ever”.

On the other hand satellite measurements have taken a continuous whole worldview since 1979.  They do not attempt to extrapolate temperatures to cover vast areas such as Russia, Northern Canada or to the poles from an increasingly limited and questionable set of ground based weather stations.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/05/uah-global-temperature-anomaly-a-bit-cooler-in-april/

Current measurements, including the more recent and reliable satellite data, (ie since 1979), and weather balloon sources, certainly show some warming but no warming since the year 1999. Since about 1850, the end of the “little ice age”, there has certainly been some warming of the planet overall, perhaps as much as 0.5°C in the 90 years between 1850 and 1940. In the 70 years since 1940 the increase in temperature has been assessed at a maximum +0.3°C. Man-made CO2 in the atmosphere only became a possible concern after 1940 but the earlier rate of warming from 1850 to 1940 was about 30% faster than in the period 1975 -1995.

Charting the World’s Energy Sources

The following calculations and graphics are based on information on national CO2 emission levels, from 1985, energy sources and electricity generation, since 1985, worldwide published by BP[i] in June 2014 for the period up until the end of 2013. The CO2 emissions data is well corroborated by previous similar datasets published by the CDIAC, Guardian and Google up until 2009.

These notes aggregate the world nations into seven logical groups with distinct attitudes to CO2 control:

developed

• United States of America, attempting CO2 emissions control under Obama’s EPA.
• The European Union, (including the UK), currently believers in action to combat Global Warming.
• Japan, the former Soviet Union, Canada and Australia are developed nations, rejecting controls on CO2 emissions.

developing

• South Korea, Iran, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia and Taiwan: more advanced developing nations, still developing rapidly, (KR IR ZA MX SA BR ID TW).
• China and Hong Kong: developing very rapidly.
• India: developing rapidly from a low base.
• Rest of World (~160 Nations): developing rapidly from a low base.

[i] http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html

Charting the World’s Developmental Deficit using the measures of electricity generation.

The following calculations and graphics are based on information on national CO2 emission levels, from 1985, energy sources and electricity generation, since 1985, worldwide published by BP in June 2014 for the period up until the end of 2013.

Or in terms electrical generating capacity / head for Developed as opposed to the Developing Nations These notes then aggregate the world nations into seven logical groups with distinct attitudes to CO2 control: developed

• United States of America, attempting CO2 emissions control under Obama’s EPA.
• The European Union, (including the UK), currently believers in action to combat Global Warming.
• Japan, the former Soviet Union, Canada and Australia are developed nations, rejecting controls on CO2 emissions.

developing

• South Korea, Iran, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia and Taiwan: more advanced developing nations, still developing rapidly, (KR IR ZA MX SA BR ID TW).
• China and Hong Kong: developing very rapidly.
• India: developing rapidly from a low base.
• Rest of World (~160 Nations): developing rapidly from a low base.

http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html

To get an idea of the development deficit of the developing nations, these notes and figures provide a short commentary on National Electricity Generation capacity used as a proxy for the level of development of the various nation groups.

To get an idea of the development deficit of the developing nations, these notes and figures provide a short commentary on National Electricity Generation capacity used as a proxy for the level of development of the various nation groups. The following diagrams particularly show the real escalation of the development of generating capacity in China from the year 2000 onwards. It also shows the comparatively low rate of generating capacity development in India but for a similarly large population. When the electricity generating capacity per head of population is considered the scale of the development deficit and slow progress in both India and the great mass of underdeveloped “Rest of the World” Nations becomes very clear. India and the Rest of the World ~160 Nations account for some 54% of the world population.  China and the Rapidly Developing Nations amount to further ~30% of world population. However when the electricity generating capacity per head of population is considered the scale of the development deficit in both India and the great mass of underdeveloped “Rest of the World” Nations becomes very clear. The following two graphs show the growth rate of generating capacity and the the growth  of generating capacity / head of ver the past 28 years.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/India-to-pitch-for-right-to-grow-for-poor-nations-during-UN-Climate-Summit/articleshow/43248278.cms?

Renewable Energy – Solar and Wind-Power: capital costs and effectiveness compared

A comparison of both the Capital Cost and Energy Producing Effectiveness of the Renewable Energy investments of the USA, Germany and the UK.

The summary diagram below collates the cost and capacity factors of Renewable Energy power sources compared to the cost and output capacity of conventional Gas Fired Electricity generation.

The associated base data is shown below:

In summary, these figures show that these three Western nations have spent of the order of at least  ~$0.5trillion in capital costs alone, (conservatively estimated, only accounting for the primary capital costs ), to create Renewable Energy electrical generating capacity.

Nominally, this total nameplate generating capacity at ~153GW should amount to about ~26% of their total electricity generation, were it fully effective.  However, because of there is an inevitable ~20% capacity factor applicable across the board for all renewables, the actual cumulative energy output by from these Renewable sources only results in ~5% of the total electricity generation for these nations.

Across the board overall solar energy is about ~34 times the cost of comparable standard Gas Fired generation and 9 times less effective.

Wind-Power is only ~12 times the comparable cost and about 4 times less effective.

The same total electrical energy output could have been produced using conventional natural gas fired electrical generation for ~$31 billion or ~1/16 of the actual capital costs expended on renewable installations.  Had conventional Gas Fired technology had been used, the full ~31 GW generating capacity would have provided non-intermittent and wholly dispatchable electricity production generated as and when needed.

The following calculations only provide conservative estimates of Renewable Energy installation capital costs.  They discount entirely the major additional costs of:

• supporting backup generation
• connection to the grid from remote locations
• the large differentials in ongoing maintenance costs.

As all Renewable Energy technologies are only viable with the support of costly government subsidies, market intervention and market manipulation, can this be a responsible use of public funds or a good reason for increasing energy costs for individuals or industry in the Western world ?

The following data sources for the USA, Germany and the UK were reviewed:

United States of America: data available 2000 – 2012

• http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60197.pdf

Germany: data available from 1990 to 2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany

United Kingdom: data available 2008 – 2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Kingdom

Note:  the Wikipedia sources are used because they normally have a green orientation and are unlikely to be questioned by the advocates of Man-made Global Warming.

These data listed above provide installed “nameplate” capacity measured in Megawatts (MW) and energy output measured across the year in total Gigawatt hours, (GWh). Thus they do not provide directly comparable values as Megawatt nameplate capacity and the actual energy outputs achieved. For this comparative exercise the annual Gigawatt hours values were revised back to equivalent Megawatts, accounting for the 8,760 hours in the year, as indicated by Prof David MacKay in “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”, page 334.

Although this measure eliminates the unpredictable and variable effects of intermittency and non-dispatchability that characterise Renewable Energy sources, it gives a conservative comparative value of the actual energy output and thus potentially available.

It allows for the calculation of capacity factors in relation to Renewable Energy technologies in each nation. The following graph shows the history of Renewable Energy (Solar and Wind power combined) installations and shows the progress year by year of actual electrical energy generated.  The Energy Information Association provides the capital cost information in US$ for the USA.  These capital costs are used for comparative purposes, but they take no account of currency variations and other local financial factors.

• http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/capitalcost/pdf/updated_capcost.pdf .

The USA Energy Information Association publishes comprehensive information on the capital costs of alternate electrical generation technologies, in Table 1 of their 2013 report. From that full list these notes consider three technologies:

• Large Scale Photovoltaic: this is the most economic of the PV technologies at ~$3.8 billion / GW.
• Combined Wind 80-20: merged onshore 80% and offshore 20% wind at ~$3.0 billion / GW.
• Natural Gas Advanced Combined Cycle: the costliest technical option at ~$1.0 billion / GW.

“Overnight Capital Cost”, (just as if an power generating installation has been created overnight), is the standard comparative measure for capital costs used in energy industries. The specific Overnight Capital Costs used include:

• Civil and structural costs
• Mechanical equipment supply and installation
• Electrical and instrumentation and control
• Project indirect costs
• Other owners costs: design studies, legal fees, insurance costs, property taxes and local electrical linkages to the Grid.

However for this comparison “Overnight Capital Costs” specifically do not include:

• Provision of Back-up power supply, “spinning reserve” for times when renewable power is unavailable.
• Fuel costs for actual generation and the spinning reserve
• Remote access costs
• Extended electrical linkages to the Grid
• Maintenance
• Financing   etc.

These further costs for Renewable Energy excluded from Overnight Capital Costs mean that its use probably significantly less economic than the comparisons provided in these tables. In addition for these comparisons the Energy Information Association data denominated in US$ is used. These brief results are primarily for comparative purposes and do not purport to give precise actual expenditures in the various nations and by governments. However, they do  clearly indicate the order of magnitude of the capital sums involved.

They also allow for the calculation of comparative figures to be established between renewable energy generation and standard Gas Fired electricity generation. The results for the individual Nations in tabular form using the EIA Overnight Capital Cost data are shown below: In graphic terms the results for renewable Energy generation in each country is shown below. Solar power is comparatively successful in the USA, because it is mainly installed in Southerly latitudes, but in Germany its very serious renewable investment in Solar amounting to more than 50% of all renewables is twice as expensive and half as effective as in the USA.  Solar energy in the UK is 55 times more expensive and half as effective again as in Germany.  Fortunately the UK only has about 25% solar generation in the Renewable mix. Wind power is about 26% effective in the USA  and about 11 times more costly than Gas Fired generation. In Germany Wind power at less than 50% of its renewable commitment is 50% more expensive and substantially less effective in the USA.  Wind power in the UK is also about 11 times more costly, similar to the USA, and rather more effective than in Germany, because of wind conditions.

In addition, there is also a very large discrepancy in maintenance costs shown in the Energy Information Association table 1. When compared to a standard Natural Gas plant, maintenance cost comparisons are as follows:

• Photovoltaics                     times ~1.6
• Onshore Wind-Power        times ~2.6
• Offshore Wind Power        times ~4.9
• Combined Wind  80 – 20    times ~4.0
• Coal (without CCS)            times ~1.9   (included for reference)
• Nuclear                              times ~6.1   (included for reference)

There are also significant questions to be answered about the longevity and engineering robustness of the Solar and Wind-Power technologies: this is particularly problematical for off-shore wind farms.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/09/11/spiegel-germanys-large-scale-offshore-windpark-dream-morphs-into-an-engineering-and-cost-nightmare/

In addition a more detailed analysis might well indicate that, in spite of the cost of fuel being essentially free, the development, fabrication and installation of both Solar and Wind-power installations involves the release of substantial amounts of CO2.  The actual savings of CO2 emissions may be hardly exceeded over their installed working life of these Renewable technologies.

http://sunweber.blogspot.fr/2014/11/prove-this-wrong.htm

Intermittancy and Non-dipatchability

However there still remains a further major problem with all Renewable Energy sources. Their electrical output is intermittent and non dispatchable. Their electrical output cannot respond to electricity demand as and when needed. Energy is contributed to the grid in a haphazard manner dependent on the weather.  This effect can seen from German electrical supply in the diagram below, for a week in August 2014, an optimum period for any solar energy input. Power certainly not necessarily available whenever required.

• http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/21/germanys-habitually-awol-green-energy-installed-windsolar-often-delivers-less-than-1-of-rated-capacity/
• http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/recent-electricity-data/stromerzeugung-und-verbrauch/
• http://www.ukpowergeneration.info

Solar power inevitably varies according to the time of day, the state of the weather and also of course radically with the seasons.  Solar power works most effectively in latitudes nearer the equator and it certainly cannot be seriously effective in Northern Europe. In the example above in August 2014 wind power input varied from 15.5 GW to 0.18 GW and the Solar contribution varied from nil to some 15 GW. Thus this Renewable Energy variability combined with the “Renewables Obligation”, which mandates that the electricity grid has to take energy from renewable sources preferentially, if available, resulted in demands on conventional generation in Germany varying from ~23GW to ~47GW over the period. In Germany, its massive commitment to solar energy can briefly provide up to ~20% of country wide demand for a few hours either side of noon on some fine summer days, but at the time of maximum power demand on winter evenings solar energy input is necessarily nil. But at the same time the output from wind power is equally variable as in the summer months.

• http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/456961/reality-check-germany-does-not-get-half-its-energy-solar

Germany has similar insolation and cloudiness characterists as Alaska and the UK being even further North has an even worse solar performance. Electricity generation from wind turbines is equally fickle, as in the week in July 2014, clearly shown above, where Wind-Power input across Germany was close to zero for several days. Similarly an established high pressure system, with little wind over the whole of Northern Europe is a common occurrence in winter months, when electricity demand is at its highest. Conversely, on occasions Renewable Energy output may be in excess of demand and this has to dumped expensively and unproductively. This is especially so, as there is still no solution to electrical energy storage on a sufficiently large industrial scale. That is the reason that the word “nominally” is used throughout these notes in relation to the name plate capacity outputs from Renewable Energy sources.

Overall these three major nations that have committed massive investments to Renewable Energy.  Conservatively this amounts to at least ~$0.5 trillion or ~2.2% of combined annual GDP.  

This investment has resulted in a “nominal” ~31Gigawatts of generating capacity from an installed Nameplate Capacity of ~150Gigawatts.  This is “nominally” almost a quarter of the total installed nameplate generating capacity.

But this nominal 31GW of Renewable Energy output is ~5.4% of the total installed generating capacity of ~570Gigawatts.  Even that 31GW of Renewable Energy production is not really as useful as one would wish, because of its intermittency and non-dispatchability.

The Significance of Carbon Dioxide CO2

All plant life and thus the whole biosphere is dependent on atmospheric CO2. At 400 ppm^v, (400/1,000,000), CO2 is still a trace gas. It is at a very low concentration when compared with the geologic past. A widely accepted diagram of global temperature and CO2 concentration in the geologic past 600 million years is shown below. Plants evolved about 500 million years ago, when the CO2 levels were much higher. Increased CO2 levels markedly improve plant growth and reduce their water requirements for transpiration, as plants need fewer and smaller, water releasing, stomata to ingest their essential CO2. Plants cannot survive at CO2 levels of less than ~200 ppm^v and are stressed by low CO2 levels. Horticulturalists deliberately add extra CO2 to their greenhouses up to a level of some 1200 ppm^v to enhance plant growth and fertility. It is estimated that the CO2 increases since 1850 have already enhanced all planetary plant growth and promoted greening of deserts by ~15%. In the past the world has seen much higher CO2 levels that were not necessarily associated with higher temperatures.

Whatever politicians and Global Warming advocates may think, promote with extreme alarm and may be convinced of, atmospheric CO2 is “clean”, essential to life and is anything but “a pollutant”.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/co2_greens_the_deserts/ http://townhall.com/columnists/craigidso/2014/09/23/mr-president-co2-is-not-pollution-its-the-elixir-of-life-n1895157/page/full

So atmospheric CO2 is the essential plant food and is thus fundamental for all life on the planet.

That is the real stuff of life. Global Warming advocates who deny that also negate the ability of the world’s entire biosphere to exist on planet earth.

Photosynthesis in plants consists of chemical reactions that use atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O), catalysed by chlorophyll to store the sun’s output as chemical energy, initially in the form of sugars. This chemical reaction then leads onto all the other organic compounds within the biosphere. The Oxygen (O2) essential for animal life is a by-product of photosynthesis and is released into the atmosphere. The following equation summarizes photosynthesis:  

                           sun light                                                           

                                          ↓                  

                          6 CO2 + 6 H2O    =  6 (CH2O) + 6 O2

                                           ↓       

                          sugars, thus leading to all other organic molecules

This amazing, almost miraculous, photosynthetic process has been working for half of the existence of the Earth, about 2.5 billion years. Land plants however have only existed for about a half billion years.

Photosynthesis is quite inefficient. Plants only absorb and convert about ½% to ¼% of the sun’s energy falling on their leaves. Geologic processes have created fossils fuels over many millions of years, and concentrated the energy from that inefficient photosynthetic process and stored it in accessible forms gas, oil, coal, etc.

But it is as if many western politicians, much of the scientific establishment, and all Green Global Warming advocates have all collectively and conveniently forgotten all their elementary school biology about photosynthesis and the carbon cycle. As a result of the failure to appreciate the elementary biology, the Western world has been forced into a massive guilt trip with endless predictions of impending global overheating catastrophes from the over-production of CO2 by mankind.

In reality any added atmospheric CO2 is just essential and increasingly useful food for plants.

Mankind’s use of fossil fuels simply releases the very diffuse and intermittent energy derived from sunlight by plants in previous eons. The release of CO2 back into the biosphere now is to the benefit of all plant life and thus to the livelihood of the planet. With the increase from ~300ppm^v to ~400ppm^v it has been assessed that planetary plant life has already increased by >10% worldwide. As an aside, this means that:

• Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS, is a chemically difficult and very costly way to try to trap and to throw away comparatively miniscule quantities of useful plant food.
• as opposed to taking the simplistic view that the fuel itself is for free, it is not evident that renewable energy technologies (solar or wind power) are necessarily that “clean”, non polluting and produce less CO2 for the equivalent energy output, when compared to fossil fuel use and viewed in the round.

Geophysical Research Letters Volume 40, Issue 12, Article first published online: 19 JUN 2013

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenergy/writev/517/m59.htm

Click to access electricitycosts2012.pdf

http://junkscience.com/2013/11/12/ethanol-is-stupid-really-stupid-ask-sel-graham/

Graphic presentations of the history of CO2 emissions worldwide

The following calculations and graphics are based on information on national CO2 emission levels worldwide published by BP[i]in June 2014 for the period from 1965 up until 2013. The data is well corroborated by previous similar datasets published by the CDIAC, Guardian [ii] and Google up until 2009 [iii]. These notes and figures provide a short commentary on that CO2 emissions history. The contrast between the developed and developing worlds is stark in terms of their history of CO2 emissions and the likely prognosis for their future CO2 output. This presentation divides the world nations into seven logical groups with distinct attitudes to CO2 control: developed

• United States of America, attempting CO2 emissions control under Obama’s EPA.
• The European Union, (including the UK), currently believers in action to combat Global Warming.
• Japan, the former Soviet Union, Canada and Australia are developed nations, rejecting controls on CO2 emissions.

developing

• South Korea, Iran, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia and Taiwan: more advanced developing nations, still developing rapidly, (KR IR ZA MX SA BR ID TW).
• China and Hong Kong: developing very rapidly.
• India: developing rapidly from a low base.
• Rest of World (~160 Nations): developing rapidly from a low base.

[i] http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html

[ii] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/31/world-carbon-dioxide-emissions-country-data-co2#data

[iii] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdFF1QW00ckYzOG0yWkZqcUhnNDVlSWc&hl=en#gid=1

Growth of Renewable Energy installation in the USA, UK and Germany

In order originally to get a fairly clear idea of the capacity factors for Renewable Energy sources Wind and Solar the data provided on Wikipedia were reviewed.

• http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60197.pdf
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Kingdom

These data sets provide historic data since 1990 in Germany but only since 2008 in the UK.

These data provide installed nameplate capacity measured in Megawatts and energy output measured across the year in Gigawatt hours. The referenced do not provide directly comparable values as Megawatt input and outputs. The values were revised to Megawatts for comparative purposes, accounting for the 8,760 hours in the year.

A normal fossil fuelled power station can be rated with a nameplate capacity of about 1000 Megawatts or 1 Gigawatt.

The development of the USA, the UK and German renewable energy since the year 2000 is shown below, (note these data do not include additional German offshore wind installations in 2013):

The graphs below summarise the available data for each country:

So the 25 year investment in Germany’s the renewable energy has contributed about the equivalent from windpower of about 6 normal power stations and solar power contributes about 3 normal power stations.

So the UK the contribution from wind is now about 3 normal power stations and only about ¼ of a normal power station is provided by UK solar power.

However there is a problem in the use of renewable energy sources. The output is not dispatchable. It cannot respond to electricity demand as and when needed. For example solar power in Germany might provide up to ~20% of country wide demand for a few hours on fine summer afternoons, but at the time of maximum power demand on winter evenings solar input is virtually nil.

See: http://theenergycollective.com/robertwilson190/456961/reality-check-germany-does-not-get-half-its-energy-solar
Similarly electricity generation from wind turbines is equally fickle, as shown for this week in July this year below:

See: http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/21/germanys-habitually-awol-green-energy-installed-windsolar-often-delivers-less-than-1-of-rated-capacity/

Overall both in the Germany and the UK solar power only produces ~7% of nameplate capacity.

Wind energy in Germany has supplied only about 17% of its installed name plate capacity over the years since 1990, and in the UK the more recent results have been rather more productive at ~23% of nameplate installed capacity since 2008.

The record of recent Man-made CO2 emissions: 1965 -2013

The following calculations and graphics are based on information on national CO2 emission levels worldwide published by BP[1]in June 2014 for the period from 1965 up until the end of 2013.  The data is well corroborated by previous similar datasets published by the CDIAC, Guardian [2] and Google up until 2009 [3].

These notes and figures provide a short commentary on that CO2 emissions history.

The contrast between the developed and developing worlds is stark in terms of their history of CO2 emissions and the likely prognosis for their future CO2 output.

Since 1980 CO2 emissions from the developed world have shown virtually no increase, whereas the developing world has had a fourfold increase since 1980: that increase is accelerating.
Similarly the CO2 output per head is declining in the developed world whereas it is accelerating the developing world.

In October 2010 Professor Richard Muller made the dilemma for all those who hope to control global warming by reducing CO2 emissions clear: in essence he said[4]:

“the Developing World is not joining-in with CO2 emission reductions nor does it have any intention of doing so.

The failure of worldwide action negates the unilateral action of any individual western Nation”.

This presentation divides the world nations into seven logical groups with distinct attitudes to CO2 control:

developed

• United States of America, attempting CO2 emissions control under Obama’s EPA.
• The European Union, (including the UK), currently believers in action to combat Global Warming.
• Japan, the former Soviet Union, Canada and Australia are developed nations, rejecting controls on CO2 emissions.

developing

• South Korea, Iran, South Africa, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Indonesia and Taiwan: more advanced developing nations, still developing rapidly, (KR IR ZA MX SA BR ID TW).
• China and Hong Kong: developing very rapidly.
• India: developing rapidly from a low base.
• Rest of World (~160 Nations): developing rapidly from a low base.

These graphs of total CO2 emission history show that up until 2013:

• there has been a stabilisation or reduction of emissions from developed economies since 1980.
• the USA, simply by exploiting shale gas for electricity generation, has already reduced its CO2 emissions by some 9.5% since 2005[5]. That alone has already had more CO2 emission reduction effect than the entire Kyoto protocol[6] [7].
• CO2 emissions from the developed economies rejecting action on CO2 have hardly grown since 2005.
• the European Union (27) has reduced its CO2 emissions by ~14% since 2005.

However

• CO2 emissions from the developing world as a whole overtook the developed world in 2007 and are now a third larger than the developed world’s CO2 emissions.
• there has been a very rapid escalation of Chinese CO2 emissions since the year 2000[8].
• China overtook the USA CO2 emissions in 2006, and Chinese emissions are now ~62% greater than the USA, the escalation in Chinese CO2 emissions continues. Chinese emissions have grown by +75% since 2005 and China continues to build coal fired powerstations to supply the bulk of its electricity as demand grows.
• India has accelerating emissions[9], growing from a low base by +63% since 2005. India too is building coal fired powerstations to increase the supply of electricity as 25% of its population still has no access to electric power.
• there is inexorable emissions growth from the Rest of the World economies, from a low base, they have grown by +30% since 2005.

So any CO2 emissions reduction achieved by the Developed Nations will be entirely negated by the increases in CO2 emissions from Developing Nations.

However probably more significant than the total CO2 emissions output is the comparison of the emissions/head for the various nation groups.

• The EU(27) even with active legal measures have maintained a fairly level CO2 emission rate but have managed to reduce their CO2 emissions/head by ~16% since 2005. Much of the recent downward trend is largely attributed to their declining economies.
• The USA has already reduced its CO2 emissions/head by ~22% since in 2005, mainly arising from the use of shale gas for electricity generation. And now Mr Putin is actively involved in backing anti-fracking campaigns in Europe so as to protect his largest Gasprom market and to have an energy stranglehold on the West, as he has demonstrated recently in the Ukraine[10].
• Russia, Japan, Canada and Australia have only grown their emissions/head by ~1% since 2005.
• China’s CO2 emissions/head have increased ~11 fold since 1965. China overtook the world-wide average in 2003 and surpassed the rapidly developing nations in 2006. China’s emissions / head at 7.0 tonnes / head are now approaching the level of the EU(27) nations.
• India’s CO2 emissions have grown by 4.7 times over the period and are now showing recent modest acceleration. That increasing rate is likely to grow substantially with increased use of coal for electricity generation[11].

When the participating nations particularly EU(27) are compared with Chinese CO2 emissions/head, an interesting picture arises:

Chinese CO2 emissions at 7.01mt/head for its 1.4 billion population are already ~43% greater than the worldwide average. Those emissions are still growing fast.

At 5.5mt/head, France, with ~80% nuclear electricity generation, has the lowest CO2 emission rates in the developed world and is at only ~12% above the world-wide average.

China’s CO2 emissions/head exceeded France’s CO2 emissions/head in 2009 and are now ~22% higher.

The UK at 7.2mt/head is now only ~48% higher than the world-wide average and only about ~3% higher than China. So China is likely to overtake the UK in the near future.

Germany, one of the largest CO2 emitters in Europe, has emissions/head ~100% higher than the worldwide average and is still ~49% higher than China. Germany’s emissions/head have increased recently because they are now burning much larger quantities of brown coal to compensate for the “irrational” closure of their nuclear generating capacity.

This must question the logic of Green attitudes in opposing Nuclear power. Following the Fukushima disaster, the German government position of rapidly eliminating nuclear power in a country with no earthquake risk and no chance of tsunamis should not be tenable.

If CO2 emissions really were a concern to arrest Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming / Man-made Climate Change, these results particularly from France show starkly the very real advantage of using Nuclear power for electricity generation.

Professor Fritz Vahrenholt was CEO of RWE Innogy, the major German windpower supplier, he had pioneered Germany’s significant advances in renewable energy, especially in the development of wind power.

Previously Professor Vahrenholt had fully accepted the IPCC reports as the foundation of his understanding of mankind’s effect on climate change. However, with his scientific background as chemist, he re-examined IPCC reports in detail. He found many errors, inconsistencies and unsupported assertions.

Accordingly he has now entirely revised his position.

 

Professor Vahrenholt’s diagram below is from his July 2012 lecture at the Royal Society [12] [13].

It shows the miniscule impact of the enormously costly efforts at decarbonisation in Germany, (die Energiewende), in comparison with the inevitable escalation of CO2 emissions from the rest of the world.

The underdeveloped nations are bound to become progressively more industrialised and more intensive users of fossil fuels to power their development and widen their distribution of electricity throughout their populations.

This is the only rational way that those nations can advance their development status.

The futility of the expenditure of vast resources on Green activities in Germany becomes clear.

German actions with its increasing risks to energy security and the growing risk to the German economy as its manufacturing industries seek more congenial energy / business environments, could only ever reduce Germany’s CO2 emissions by ~150,000,000 tonnes between 2006 and 2030.

That would only amount to ~1/100 of the concomitant growth in other CO2 emissions from the developing world.

According to Bjorn Lomborg the ~€125billion German investment in solar power alone, not including other renewable investments, can only reduce the onset of Global Warming by a matter of about 37 hours by the year 2100[14].

This point is re-emphasised above, by cross comparing the annual growth in emissions from China and India with the full annual emissions from key European countries. Chinese CO2 emissions growth in some years can exceed the total UK and French emissions level and even approach the German level on occasions.

Professor Varhenholt is now convinced that it is nature and in particular the behaviour of the sun that is responsible for our continually changing climate, and as he said as the final point of his Royal society lecture:

“This change can only develop first with a revolution of our minds.”

and to paraphrase Bill Clinton

“It’s not mankind creating climate. It’s the sun: stupid.”

Professor Varhenholt and his colleague Sebastian Luening have now published a best seller in Germany “Die Kalte Sonne”, the book now released in English as

“The Neglected Sun: Why the Sun Precludes Climate Catastrophe”[15].

[1] http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html

[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/31/world-carbon-dioxide-emissions-country-data-co2#data

[3] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdFF1QW00ckYzOG0yWkZqcUhnNDVlSWc&hl=en#gid=1

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5m6KzDnv7k

[5] http://www.c3headlines.com/2013/07/a-fracking-revolution-us-now-leads-world-in-co2-emission-reductions-.html

[6]http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/project_syndicate/2012/09/thanks_to_fracking_u_s_carbon_emissions_are_at_the_lowest_levels_in_20_years_.html

[7] http://www.oilandgasonline.com/doc/u-s-fracking-has-carbon-more-whole-world-s-wind-solar-0001

[8] http://www.pbl.nl/en/news/pressreleases/2011/steep-increase-in-global-co2-emissions-despite-reductions-by-industrialised-countries

[9] http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-06-10/global-warming/29642669_1_kyoto-protocol-second-commitment-period-

[10] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/fracking/10911942/Russia-in-secret-plot-against-fracking-Nato-chief-says.html

[11] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/India-invokes-right-to-grow-to-tell-rich-nations-of-its-stand-on-future-climate-change-negotiations/articleshow/36724848.cms

[12] http://www.thegwpf.org/gwpftv/?tubepress_page=2&tubepress_video=cR434ddtrMI

[13] http://kaltesonne.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/vahrenholt-2012-annual-gwpf-lecture.pdf

[14] http://www.lomborg.com/content/2013-03-germany-pays-billions-delay-global-warming-37-hours

[15] http://notrickszone.com

Temperature reduction outcomes from de-carbonisation

To quantify what might be achieved by any political action for de-carbonization by Western economies, the comparative tables below show the remaining effectiveness of each 100ppm^v tranche up to 1000ppmv, with the total global warming in each of the five diminution assessments.  These estimates depend on the calculations set out in the following associated essay:

https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/the-diminishing-influence-of-increasing-carbon-dioxide-co2-on-temperature/

The table below shows the likely range of warming arising from these divergent (sceptical and IPCC) views, (without feedbacks, which are questionably either negative or positive: but probably not massively positive as assumed by CAGW alarmists), that would be averted with an increase of CO2 for the full increase from 400 ppm^v  up to 1000 ppm^v. The results above for countries and country groups show a range for whichever scenario of only a matter of a few thousandths to a few hundredths of a degree Centigrade.

However it is extremely unlikely that the developing world is going to succumb to non-development of their economies on the grounds of reducing CO2 emissions. So it is very likely that the developing world’s CO2 emissions are going to escalate whatever is done by developed nations.

These figures show that whatever the developed world does in terms of decreasing CO2 emissions the outcome is likely to be absolutely immaterial.

The table below assumes that the amount of CO2 released by each of the world’s nations or nation is reduced universally by some 20%: this is a radical reduction level but just about conceivable.

The extreme, economically destructive and immensely costly efforts by participating western nations to reduce temperature by de-carbonization should be seen in context:

• the changing global temperature patterns, the current standstill and likely impending cooling.
• the rapidly growing CO2 emissions from the bulk of the world’s most populous nations as they continue their development.
• the diminishing impact of any extra CO2 emissions on any temperature increase.
• normal daily temperature variations at any a single location range from 10°C to 20°C.
• normal annual variations value can be as much as 40°C to 50°C.
• that participating Europe as a whole only accounts for ~11% of world CO2 emissions.
• that the UK itself is now only about ~1.5% of world CO2 emissions.

As the margin of error for temperature measurements is about 1.0°C, the minuscule temperature effects shown above arise from the extreme economic efforts of those participating nations attempting to control their CO2 emissions. Thus the outcomes in terms of controlling temperature can only ever be marginal, immeasurable and thus irrelevant.

The committed Nations by their actions alone, whatever the costs they incurred to themselves, might only ever effect virtually undetectable reductions of World temperature. So it is clear that all the minor but extremely expensive attempts by the few convinced Western nations at the limitation of their own CO2 emissions will be inconsequential and futile[i].

Professor Judith Curry’s Congressional testimony 14/1/2014[ii]:

“Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile. The stagnation in greenhouse warming observed over the past 15+ years demonstrates that CO2 is not a control knob on climate variability on decadal time scales.”

Professor Richard Lindzen UK parliament committee testimony 28/1/2014 on IPCC AR5[iii]:

“Whatever the UK decides to do will have no impact on your climate, but will have a profound impact on your economy. (You are) Trying to solve a problem that may not be a problem by taking actions that you know will hurt your economy.”

and paraphrased “doing nothing for fifty years is a much better option than any active political measures to control climate.”

As global temperatures have already been showing stagnation or cooling[iv] over the last seventeen years or more, the world should now fear the real and detrimental effects of global cooling[v] rather than being hysterical about limited, beneficial or now non-existent warming[vi].

[i] http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.fr/2013/11/lomborg-spain-wastes-hundreds-of.html

[ii] http://www.epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=07472bb4-3eeb-42da-a49d-964165860275

[iii] http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/28/uk-parliamentary-hearing-on-the-ipcc/

[iv] http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3436241/the-inescapable-apocalypse-has-been-seriously-underestimated.thtml

[v] http://www.iceagenow.com/Triple_Crown_of_global_cooling.htm

[vi] http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/28/global-cooling-consensus-is-heating-up-cooling-over-the-next-1-to-3-decades/

The diminishing effect of increasing CO2 concentrations on global temperature

Introduction

I hope that these notes follow the lead of Professor David Mackay in as much they attempt to quantify and thus question many of the aspects of the Green dogma and the assertions of the possibility of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming / Climate Change just using some simple mathematics.

Very sadly Professor Mackay died prematurely in April 2016.  In spite of the fact that he was a green supporter and was for a period the chief scientific advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, DECC.  He also agreed with a rational / radical de-carbonisation of the Western economies

But at same time he was devoutly rational preferring mathematics to Green religious conjecture.

Accordingly, one of his most recent quotes was that the attempt to try to power the UK economy with weather dependent Renewable Energy was as he said “an appalling delusion”.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/03/idea-of-renewables-powering-uk-is-an-appalling-delusion-david-mackay

And as he has said it only takes some trivial “back of the envelope” calculations to prove that it is so.  This and my other notes do some of those trivial “back of the envelope” calculations disproove points of Green dogma.

However there is one point where I would entirely disagree with Professor Mackay  i.e. that Carbon Capture and Storage, CCS, is an essential technology to be developed in order to avoid CO2 emissions.

I would rather characterise CCS as “an expensive way of throwing away comparatively small quantities of useful plant food”.

Summary

• the Greenhouse effect is essential to all life on earth, without that warming effect of ~+33°C the planet would be a very cold and inhospitable place indeed.
• the world needs its atmospheric CO2 for the survival and fertilisation of plant life: it thus supports all life on earth.
• atmospheric CO2, whether Man-made or mostly naturally occurring, is not pollutant.
• the effectiveness of CO2 as a Greenhouse gas rapidly diminishes logarithmically with increasing concentration.
• although several scientific sources assert that CO2 has no real effect on global temperature, these notes calculate the effects of CO2 as presented in data from climate activists: they find that the impact of rising CO2 concentrations on global warming is even at its greatest extent to be insignificant.
• a concentration of atmospheric CO2 < 200 ppmv equivalent to ~77% of CO2’s Greenhouse effectiveness is essential to maintain plant life and thus life on earth.
• at the current level of ~400 ppmv, only ~13% of the effectiveness of CO2 as a Greenhouse gas remains.
• so little of the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse gas now remains that there is no possibility of ever attaining the much feared +2°C temperature rise caused by Man-made CO emissions, that is thought to be so catastrophic by alarmists and sadly by convinced Western world politicians.
• increasing CO2 in the atmosphere can only lead to very limited further warming and certainly not to any catastrophic and dangerous temperature increase.
• a doubling of CO2 concentration from 400 ppmv to 800 ppmv, (climate sensitivity), can only result in a temperature increase of ~0.37°C according to the likely  median case and the worst case can only result in less than +1.0 °C
• mankind’s attempts to control global temperature by the limitation of CO2 emissions from combustion of fossil fuels can only ever have marginal or immeasurable effects.
• therefore all de-carbonisation efforts by mankind are misguided and irrelevant.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/20/greenpeace-co-founder-pens-treatise-on-the-positive-effects-of-co2-says-there-is-no-crisis/

• As global temperatures have already been showing stagnation or cooling over the last eighteen years or more, the world should now fear the real and detrimental effects of global cooling, rather than being hysterical about limited, beneficial or now non-existent further warming.

The importance of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere

Photosynthetic plants originally evolved in an environment of atmospheric CO2 at many 1000’s ppmv.  In the horticultural business plant growth is routinely enhanced by adding levels of CO2 in their greenhouses to be three times or more than that of the external atmosphere.

Current CO2 concentrations at 400 ppmv are low when compared with the average atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the past 300 million or so years which ranged between 1000 ppmv and 1200 ppmv.

So at present levels the earth’s biosphere is still only marginally above a minimal CO2 level for plant and thus planetary survival and any further concentrations of atmospheric CO2 can only have a positive entirely beneficial effect on plant growth.

As at current levels the world is at a comparatively low level of CO2 and plant life is still close to CO2 starvation.  In order to absorb sufficient CO2 for their survival, plants have to have larger stomata in their leaves:  these larger stomata transpire more water vapour.  So higher CO2 concentrations reduce the amount of water that plants need for survival.

Recent publications have  now established that over the past few decades the earth’s vegetation has grown substantially by ~15% globally.  This is attributed simply to the higher levels of atmospheric CO2.

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate3004.html

In the light of these well known facts, atmospheric CO2, whether Man-made or  naturally occurring, cannot be regarded in any way as pollutant.

Rather atmospheric CO2 should be regarded as the very stuff of life it is on planet Earth.

 

The diminishing effect of CO2 concentration on temperature

The temperature increasing capability of current levels of atmospheric CO2 is thought to be real enough but the effect is minor and very marginal.  Many climatologists and meteorologists consider the effect of atmospheric CO2 to be virtually insignificant amongst the other major causes of climate variation, (the sun, planetary mechanics, ocean circulations, etc.), whereas others, “Climate Alarmists”, assert that CO2 alone is the main driver of climate change and the control knob of global temperature.

These notes quantify the current and likely future Man-made CO2 temperature effects on climate, according to the publications accepted by Global Warming Alarmists.

The influence of CO2 concentration on temperature is known and is widely accepted to diminish progressively as its concentration increases.  This is a crucial fact.  This fact is not acknowledged in the IPCC summary for Policy Makers.

https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf

The physics of CO2’s effect on temperature is not linear, its potency  falls off logarithmically with increasing concentrations.

Both  Global Warming advocates and Climate Change sceptics agree on this.  IPCC Published reports, (TAR3), acknowledge that the effective temperature increase caused by growing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere radically diminishes with increasing concentrations.  This information is presented in the IPCC reports.  However it is well disguised from any lay reader, (Chapter 6. Radiative Forcing of Climate Change: section 6.3.4 Total Well-Mixed Greenhouse Gas Forcing Estimate).

The logarithmic diminution effect is an inconvenient fact for Global Warming advocates and Climate Alarmists.  It is nonetheless well understood within the climate science community.   

But the effect is not much discussed nor ever emphasised.

An illustration  of the CO2 diminution effect with increasing concentrations, can be imagined as if one was painting over a window with successive layers of white paint.  The first layer will still be translucent, subsequent layers will progressively reduce the translucency until the window is fully obscured and thereafter further paint layers can make no further difference to the fact that the window is already fully obscured.

Similarly extra concentrations of atmospheric CO2 have ever diminishing effects on temperature, until at about 1000 ppmv they become totally negligible.

The logarithmic diminution effect is the likely reason there was no runaway greenhouse warming caused by CO2 in earlier eons when CO2 levels were known to be at levels of several thousand parts per million by volume, (ppmv).

 

The proportional consequences of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations

Using the currently accepted estimates the following simplifying diagram shows the logarithmic diminution effect using tranches of 100 ppmv up to 1000 ppmv and the proportional significance of differing CO2 concentrations on the biosphere.

• Up to ~200 ppmv, is the equivalent to about ~77% of the temperature increasing effectiveness of CO2.

This level of atmospheric CO2 concentration is absolutely essential to sustain photosynthesis in plants and thereby to maintain the viability of all life on earth.  The CO2 level can diminish significantly in glacial ice ages and as a result life on on earth has often been close to real extinction.

• ~300 ppmv was an approximate agreed level prior to any industrialisation, this atmospheric CO2 made the continuing survival of the biosphere possible, but it is only causing a further 5.9% of the CO2 Greenhouse warming effect.
• Following that a further 100 ppmv, (now accepted by the IPCC both a natural effect and to be only ~50% man-made), it adds ~4.2% of the CO2 effectiveness brings the current level ~400 ppmv.

CO2 concentration  at 400 ppmv is already committed and immutable.  So CO2 has already reached about ~87% of its potential warming effect in the atmosphere.  Adding Man-made or naturally derived CO2 in increasing amounts can only have the minor effects as shown below in 100 ppmv tranches.

Thereafter the following 100 ppmv tranches will give the following  percentage increase in CO2 effectiveness as a Greenhouse gas:

Up to 400 ppmv is committed and immutable, as shown shaded above.  At 400 ppmv only ~13% of the effectiveness of CO2 as a Greenhouse Gas now remains even up to the level of  ~1000 ppmv.  And beyond that  ~1000 ppmv level higher concentrations can have virtually no further warming effect.

This means that a doubling the CO2 concentration, (Climate sensitivity), from 400 ppmv to 800 ppmv can only add about 10% to the current effectiveness of CO2 as a heat retaining Greenhouse gas.

 

Alternate views of the significance of CO2 as a Greenhouse Gas

Skeptical scientists and the IPCC publish alternate views of the reducing effect on temperature of the importance of CO2 concentration.  These alternates are proportionally equivalent but vary in the degree of warming attributable to increasing CO2 concentrations.

The IPCC publishes the following three views of the total effect of CO2 as a greenhouse gas up to ~1200 ppmv.  In total they range in temperature from +6.5°C to +14.8°C and could give future additional warming between the current ~400 ppmv level and the 1000 ppmv However when the values between 400 ppmv and 1000 ppmv are scaled of the IPCC chart the range for level of in the range of +~0.49°C and +~0.85°C.

However other views have also been asserted both by skeptical scientists and CDIAC,

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Centre and Murry Salby recently asserted that CO2 only contributes ~2% too the overall Greenhouse effect.

“The vast majority of that [greenhouse] warming is contributed by water vapor. Together with cloud, it accounts for 98% of the greenhouse effect.”  

http://notrickszone.com/2016/05/13/salby-sees-little-co2-driving-mechanism-skeptical-view-of-co2-science-is-in-fact-textbook-science/#sthash.GhRhHoVk.dpbs

What all these different analyses show is the amount of future warming that might be attributed to additional atmospheric CO2 in excess of the current level of ~400 ppmv is going to be between marginal and non-existent.

Looking to the future in excess of the current 400 ppmv, wide variation exists between the different warming estimates up to 1000 ppmv.  So the range of the CO2 element of the +33°C GreenHouse effect ranges from ~2% to ~21%.

A proportional comparison between these estimates are set out below in the context of the overall ~+33°C total Greenhouse Effect.  The temperature increase figures shown here in orange are for the increase in CO2 concentration from 400 – 1000 ppmv.

Five postulates are shown here, which have been provided by sceptic sources and the IPCC.  The graph shows in orange the remaining temperature effect of CO2 that could be affected by radical worldwide global de-carbonisation policies, maintaining CO2 levels at the current 400 ppmv.  The warming that might result by raising the CO2 level from 400 ppmv up to 1000 ppmv, according to each of these postulates.

The range of alternate postulates shows CO2 affecting in the range of ~2% – ~20%.  Of these a median value of ~10% is agreed between Lindzen, (as published by the IPCC) and other sceptic academics such as Plimer, Carter, Ball and Archibald.  Even lower values are quotes down to ~2% (Salby), whereas other IPCC quoted values give CO2 a significance of  up to ~21%.

In alarmist terms of course, a CO2 concentration reaching 1000 ppmv would be considered as beyond catastrophic even though at a maximum it might only give rise to a temperature increase of ~0.49°C according to the median case.

The concomitant effect of the higher levels of warming from atmospheric CO2 that have been postulated is that the proportion of the total ~33°C then attributable the water vapour and clouds in the atmosphere is displaced so as to be unrealistically even down to 79%.

It is simply not plausible that CO2, still a minor trace gas in the atmosphere, currently at the level of ~400 ppmv, or 0.04%, achieves such radical control of Global temperature, when compared to the substantial and powerful Greenhouse Effect of water vapour and clouds in the atmosphere?

There are the clearly divergent views of the amount of warming that can result from additional CO2 in future.  But even in a worst case scenario of maximum CO2 effectiveness, whatever change that may happen can now only ever have a marginal future effect on global temperature and it certainly cannot lead to a catastrophic and dangerous temperature increase.

Whatever political efforts are made to de-carbonize economies or to reduce Man-made CO2 emissions, (and to be effective at temperature control those efforts would have to be universal and worldwide), those efforts can only now affect at most ~13% of the future warming potential of CO2 even up to the unthinkably high level of 1000 ppmv.

To quantify directly what might be achieved, the comparative table below show the remaining effectiveness of each 100 ppmv tranche up to 1000 ppmv, with the total global warming in each of the five logarithmic diminution assessments.  The table shows the likely range of warming arising from these divergent (Skeptical and IPCC views), that would be averted with an increase of CO2 for the full increase from 400 ppmv  up to 1000 ppmv.  In addition in pink the table shows the temperature effect of doubling CO2 concentration to 800 ppmv, (assessed Climate sensitivity, (shown in pink)).

These calculations discount any feedbacks.  Alarmist climate modellers assume significant positive feedbacks caused by a slight increase in temperatures resulting in greater water evaporation that then increase the postulated amount of water vapour in the atmosphere so as to exaggerate the amount of warming that might arise from increased Man-made or Natural CO2 increases.

However such temperature feedbacks are questionable and could well be either negative or positive.  In any event they are probably not massively positive as assumed and relied on by Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming alarmists.

As shown below, the recent past, (last ~20 Years), shows a significant divergence between models and observed reality, with a marked lack of warming compared with averaged model results.  Over this 20 year period Man-made CO2 emissions, that have escalated by some ~+60% since 1996 and atmospheric CO2 once concentration has risen by ~+10%, (360 ppmv – 400 ppmv).

In the past Global Warming advocates have always asserted that all increases in the concentration of CO2 are solely Man-made.  However the biosphere and long term slightly warming oceans will also outgas CO2 over the long term, century by century.  And the recent IPCC report now asserts that only ~50% of the current increase in CO2 is Man-made.  The historic record shows that CO2 concentrations lag behind any temperature increase, rather than being a consequence of it.  The delay period is about 800 years.

Importantly as the future temperature effect of increasing CO2 emissions can only be so minor, there is no possibility of ever attaining the much vaunted political danger zone target of +2.0°C by the control of mankind’s CO2 emissions 

De-carbonisation Outcomes

It is extremely unlikely that the Developing world is going to succumb to the restriction and non-development of their economies on the grounds of reducing CO2 emissions.

So the Developing world’s CO2 emissions will continue to escalate whatever is done by Developed nations.  These figures show that whatever the Developed world does in terms of decreasing CO2 emissions the outcome is likely to be absolutely immaterial, both for the increase of CO2 for the next 100 ppmv and even for doubling the current CO2 level up to 800 ppmv.

These results for countries and country groups show a range for whichever scenario of only a matter of a few thousandths to a few hundredths of a degree Centigrade.

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.fr/2013/11/lomborg-spain-wastes-hundreds-of.html

The table below is based on BP data on CO2 emissions by country.

http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy.html

and the aggregation of that data into nation groups.

https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/man-made-co2-emissions-1965-2015/

It assumes that the amount of CO2 released by each of the world’s nations or region is eliminated and this table shows the likely warming effects that might be averted both from the point of view of the next 100 ppmv  and then as if the the current CO2 level is doubled to ~800 ppmv.

The impact of any action taken by Man-kind to try to control climate by CO2 reduction can only have such minimal effect as to be unnoticeable within the inevitable noise in the climate system and is thus absolutely irrelevant.

The extreme, economically destructive and immensely costly efforts by participating Western nations to reduce temperature by their own de-carbonization should be seen in context:

• the changing global temperature patterns, the current 18 year+ standstill and likely impending cooling.
• the rapidly growing CO2 emissions from the bulk of the world’s most populous nations as they continue their development.
• that Europe as a whole now only accounts for ~10% of world CO2 emissions and is likely to drop to ~7% by 2030.
• that the UK itself is now only about ~1.3% of world CO2 emissions and is likely to drop to ~0.9% by 2030.
• the minimal temperature reduction that might be achieved by de-carbonistion actions in the Developed world
• the diminishing impact of any extra CO2 emissions on any temperature increase.
• normal daily temperature variations at any a single location range from 10°C to 20°C.normal annual variations value can be as much as 40°C to 50°C.

As the margin of error for temperature measurements is about 1.0°C, so the minuscule temperature effects shown here would only arise from the extreme economic efforts of those participating Developed nations attempting to control their CO2 emissions.

Thus the outcomes in terms of controlling temperature can only ever be marginal, immeasurable and thus irrelevant.

Conclusions

It is likely that any current global warming, if it is now continuing at all and increasing CO2 is:

• largely a natural process
• within normal limits
• definitely  beneficial.

It could be not be significantly influenced by any remedial de-carbonisation action, however drastic, taken by mankind.

And it is impossible that the actions of mankind could ever achieve anything like as much as +2°C by arising from its CO2 emissions

In a rational, non-political, world that prospect should be greeted with unmitigated joy.  If that were so:

• all concern over CO2 as a man-made “pollutant” can be entirely discounted.
• it is not essential to disrupt the economies of the Western world to no purpose.
• the commitment of costs to the Europe so far over a 60 year period is estimated to be of the order of €3.1 trillion 

https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/lifetime-costs-for-renewable-energy-in-europe/

• this does not include the diversion of employment and industries to other nations, where concern over Global Warming is not a priority.
• this is deliberate economic self-harm that can be avoided, if the concept of Man-made global warming from CO2 emissions is refuted.  Those simple calculations are set out here.
• these vast resources could be spent for much more worthwhile endeavours.
• were warming happening, naturally or enhanced by  mankind, it would provide a more benign, productive and supportive climate for the biosphere and mankind.
• any extra CO2 is already increasing the fertility of all plant life on the planet.
• if warming is occurring at all, a warmer climate would provide a future of greater opportunity and prosperity for human development, especially so for the third world.
• the Nations committed to take action on Green thinking by decarbonisation, whatever the costs they incurred to themselves, might only ever effect virtually undetectable reductions of World temperature.  
• it is clear that all effectively minor but extremely expensive attempts the by the few convinced Western nations at the limitation of their own CO2 emissions will be inconsequential and futile.

Professor Judith Curry’s Congressional testimony 14/1/2014.

“Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile. The stagnation in greenhouse warming observed over the past 15+ years demonstrates that CO2 is not a control knob on climate variability on decadal time scales.”

Professor Richard Lindzen UK parliament committee testimony 28/1/2014 on IPCC AR5.

“Whatever the UK decides to do will have no impact on your climate, but will have a profound impact on your economy. (You are) Trying to solve a problem that may not be a problem by taking actions that you know will hurt your economy.” 

These quotes could be paraphrased as:

“doing nothing for fifty years is a much better option than any active political measures attempting to control climate.”

As global temperatures have already been showing stagnation or cooling

http://www.iceagenow.com/Triple_Crown_of_global_cooling.htm

 over the last eighteen years or more, the world should now fear the real and detrimental effects of global cooling, rather than being hysterical about limited, previously beneficial or now non-existent warming.

http://notrickszone.com/2010/12/28/global-cooling-consensus-is-heating-up-cooling-over-the-next-1-to-3-decades/

The Temperature Context

The graph above shows results from the UK Meteorological Office Central England Temperature record (CET) since the turn of the millennium up until 2013. This is a small part of the world’s longest running temperature record. It appears not to have been significantly tampered with as have so many other official temperature records.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/01/nasas-arctic-fudge-factory-more-than-half-of-claimed-arctic-warming-stems-from-data-adjustments/

It would also seem to be a relatively reliable proxy for European temperatures as a whole. Although Europe has seen a warmer wetter winter this year, 2013 -2014, North America has seen one of the coldest winters ever recorded.

http://ec.gc.ca/meteo-weather/default.asp?lang=En&n=5BA5EAFC-1&offset=10&toc=show

From this it is clear that since the beginning of the millennium the UKMO CET decline has been about -0.89°C in 13 years. Perhaps more significant the winter season temperatures (December January February) have diminished even further by -1.55°C. This significant decline has resulted in loss of agricultural productivity throughout Europe. But these recent features of the Central England / European temperature record should be seen in a much longer term 500,000 year historic context. The more normal state of the earth in current geological times is full glaciation, with ice sheets covering much of the land outside the tropics. There have been five warmer interglacial periods in the last 500,000 years. The timing of glaciation and inter-glacials is driven by planetary mechanics.

Click to access Probability_of_Sudden_Global_Cooling.pdf

The previous Eemian interglacial epoch was some 120,000 years ago. At its peak it was about 3°C warmer than our current Holocene interglacial: hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta. The Eemian epoch also lasted about 10,000+ years.

Petit, J.R., et al., 2001. Vostok Ice Core Data for 420,000 Years. IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology Data Contribution Series #2001-076. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA.

The Civilisation of Mankind has thrived and developed in the last 10,000+ years, the period of the current warm and benign Holocene interglacial. From past records, our current benign Holocene interglacial period should be drawing to its close. The temperature record of the Holocene epoch can be seen in the GRIP Greenland ice core data. Its information is replicated in several other similar long term ice core records.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/greenland/greenland.html

The Holocene epoch started with a “climate optimum” with its highest temperature values. In spite of the notable Minoan, Roman and Medieval warm periods the overall temperatures have progressively diminished by about 1.5°C since 8000BC.

The most recent millennium 1000 – 2000 AD has been the coldest 1000 year period of the current, benign Holocene epoch .

http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/chapters-8-10/

The Central England Temperature record, (CET) has been maintained and supported by the UK Meteorological Office since 1659.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html

Although the CET record covers only a small part of the northern hemisphere, it has shown a consistent rise since the end of the little ice age in 1850 at a rate of about +0.45°C / century or about +0.77°C in the last 150 years. This rise accords well with other temperature records. Mankind’s industrialisation could not have had much impact on climate prior to 1850, when CO2 levels were ~280-300 ppmv. The CET shows a gain of about 0.76°C 1850 to 1999 and there was a particular spurt up to the end of the last century. This temperature spurt coincided with increasing CO2 levels and is attributed by the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by Anthropogenic Climate Change advocates wholly to the growing industrial CO2 emissions of mankind. The temperature gains since 1970 coincided well with three active solar cycles 21 – 22 – 23. This period of high level solar activity matches the timing of the great Global Warming scare.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/realism-in-the-latest-ipcc-climate-report-by-bj-rn-lomborg

Since the year 2000 a change has occurred: the CET record shows a marked reduction from its high levels loosing all the gains that it has made since 1850, even though at the same time CO2 levels have escalated further to ~400ppmv. The current solar cycle 24

http://www.irishtimes.com/sun-s-bizarre-activity-may-trigger-another-ice-age-1.1460937

is very much weaker. Solar experts predict that weakness will continue at least into cycle 25 peaking in the 2020s or even further.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/02/the-sun-is-still-in-a-funk-sunspot-numbers-are-dropping-when-they-should-be-rising/

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/02/study-predicts-the-sun-is-headed-for-a-dalton-like-solar-minimum-around-2050/

Solar activity levels are then likely to be back to the levels of the Little Ice Age, around 1800 or the Dalton minimum. Although the visible light output of the sun is remarkably constant, its other electromagnetic radiations can vary significantly. These other radiative effects, that are mapped by the sunspot number, may well have much more influence over world climate.

http://informthepundits.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/sunspot-double-peak-over/

Between 1850 and 1999 UKMO CET gained about 0.7°C . But in the last 13 years of since 2000, the CET winter December – March temperatures have shown a significant loss ~ -1.5°C. Although the CET relates to a relatively small area of the Northern hemisphere this would seem to be a truly radical change over the last 13 years. At the same time for the last 17+ years there has been a standstill in world temperatures overall shown in the HADCRUT data sets. However recently a further more extreme, perhaps extraordinary, escalation of the temperature local UK decline has occurred. In the first half of 2013, January – June, CET temperatures were a full 1.89°C lower than the monthly averages of the previous 12 years. This cooling phenomenon has been seen widely throughout Europe and the remainder of the Northern Hemisphere.

http://notrickszone.com/2013/08/01/germanys-mean-temperature-anamoly-for-2013-still-well-below-normal-despite-heat-wave-hysteria/

http://ec.gc.ca/meteo-weather/default.asp?lang=En&n=5BA5EAFC-1&offset=10&toc=show#sthash.UVvrAhWU.dpuf

The effect has been mirrored in the Southern hemisphere.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/sunspots_and_the_great_cooling_ahead.html

That decline has lead to significant crop failures and serious loss of agricultural productivity.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/17/uk-china-wheat-idUKBRE96G00020130717

In their recent report the IPCC have reluctantly accepted that global temperatures have stopped increasing and as can be seen above they may already be falling radically.

But throughout this period CO2 levels have been increasing. Perhaps its the sun and planetary mechanics that control the world’s climate.  

The last millennium 1000 – 2000 AD was the coldest of the whole of our currently benign Holocene epoch. At about 10,000 years long, the Holocene is coming towards its end. Then there will be an inevitable slide into the next real ice age, whether this century, this millennium or the next.

http://www.climatescienceamerica.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55:cern-cloud-experiment-confirms-solar-influence-on-climate