Sunday
Sep232012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill My speech from the Spectator debate
Sep 23, 2012 Climate: Models Climate: WG2 Energy: wind A slightly adapted version of my speech from the Spectator debate has been posted at the magazine's Coffee House blog.
Read it here.
Reader Comments (29)
Excellent. Only one question. Is Alex Salmond Blackadder or Baldrick?
That was a slightly scary photograph.
I get the feeling Salmond is the guy who sends both Blackadder and Baldrick from the trenches into the line of fire. in the final episode
The answer to life, the universe, and everything is actually 42, not 43.
the error seems quite ironic.In the context of
Good speech, though.
Mike Jackson
I paused between forty and three so they knew that I knew that.
Very well put article.
You have added a ruthless streak to the last time I saw you on tv your grace, excellent speech.
After reading the comments I am afraid I was less than friendly, sorry about that:
A very good synopsis, carefully weighed - well said but this nails it for me, in my humble opinion:
How can 'they' [anyone] quibble with those figures?
This will do very nicely for an old school friend of mine. Thanks.
How can 'they' [anyone] quibble with those figures?
They did. And will go on insisting that wind is free once the turbine is installed. Well gas is free too, once the well is completed. There's just the little complication that the reliable gas fired generator makes electricity with his product for much less than the unreliable wind producer, and the latter also needs a huge subsidy not just fixed, but exponentially rising, onto our bills as a renewable obligation, plus the constant need for a rolling backup anyway.
And all the Landed Lords, receiving fat annual rental fees, vote it in as an exceedingly good idea.
Yes, as far as it goes, but you missed the most important point!
The most important thing to say is that if this is all in search of stopping climate change (as Ed Davey said today at the Lib-Dem conference), it is, even in its own terms, totally futile. Scotland could vanish from the earth and take all its emissions with it, and it would make no difference to warming.
Even were the UK as a whole to vanish, it is too small to make any difference.
Even were the UK and the US to vanish in totality, the effect would take a scientific calculator to register it. I mean, it would be fractions of a degree C.
This is what you should have said. And then you should have asked, tell me again, why are we doing this to ourselves? We are doing nothing which will make the slightest impression on the alleged problem, and it is costing a bomb. Why?
Michel
That is the scary bit. You can accept that they have bought into CAGW but you can not accept that they do not understand the futility of the UK acting alone. If for no other reason; that makes it a conspiracy.
Sep 23, 2012 at 9:19 PM |
Perhaps the UK government believes all nations are doing their share in combating CO2 emissions. So the UK are giving their infinitesimal contribution as well, for loyalty's sake. Apparently none of these governments knows that when you sum all the issues in installing the subsequent generations of windmills (they are NOT turbines, we find these in steamships, coal- and nuclear plants and the like) the savings in electricity you get are of the order of 1.6% of the windmills' installed capacity. These savings can be observed now, for wind electricity contributions to the grid of about 4%. For larger contributions we have not yet enough data, but for sure, the savings percentage will not be larger.
Of course, the windies will go "la-la-la" for any engineering information, and they have a large financial lobby by now.
The 2009 IPCC 'Energy Budget' exaggerates IR absorbed in the atmosphere 5x by falsely claiming the Earth radiates as a black body in a vacuum hence the imaginary positive feedback. This breaches 'Poynting's Theorem', one of the most fundamental axiom of radiation physics.
As the real GHE is atmospheric thermal IR reducing surface GHG band emissivity, there can be no CO2-AGW. This madness has no scientific basis. It's our equivalent of 1930's fascist dogma with every tinpot demagogue claiming moral superiority on the back of it. As the windmills don't save CO2, you need other technologies to solve the fossil fuel issue.
On Sep 23, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Albert Stienstra wrote:
Not all turbines are windmills, but windmills are turbines; by definition. See Webster:
cheers,
gary
The motive force for wind turbines is the vain being moved by money.
There is a famous Swedish children's TV show called "Fablernas Värld" (World of Fables), where the people live in the clouds, reality is ignored, dumb things go on the whole time, and everything is run by a not very wise owl.
It has become a slang expression in Swedish, when somebody persists in a monumental folly, to say that they "live in Fablernas Värld".
The Green industry, not just in Scotland, seem to have taken out permanent residence in Fablernas Värld.
An excellent speech. Any thing to counter your arguments is based on lies and misleading statements.
michel: you ask why are we doing this to ourselves.
Well, Oliver Letwin (Cabinet Office Minister) provided the answer last year: link. Here's what he said:
In other words, the Government expects our policy to persuade the developing economies - especially China and India - to say: "wait a minute, the UK is developing a "green" energy policy - we’d better follow suit, halt our economic development and keep millions of our people in continuing poverty".
It is, of course, totally delusional - as well as being arrogant, self-harming, neo-colonial nonsense.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/plan-for-credit-cards-to-ration-individuals-carbon-use-408508.html
Here we go again... David Milipede this time.
Robin: 'It is, of course, totally delusional - as well as being arrogant, self-harming, neo-colonial nonsense.'
Correct, the EU assumes the IPCC 'consensus' gives it the moral authority to impose neo-colonialism. The most obvious aspect is the carbon offset plantations, the last part of the emissions' trading scam. As it is, the 'consensus' fails at the very first hurdle,see above.
on Sep 23, 2012 at 10:38 PM | Gary Turner wrote: "Not all turbines are windmills, but windmills are turbines; by definition. See Webster"
I am afraid Mr Webster has produced a very unclear definition. Indeed, air turbines exist, but only for compressed air. It is very strange to see windmill vanes as an engine. The essence of a turbine is that it is an enclosed rotary engine to accommodate high pressure.
I guess Mr Webster did not have an engineering background.
Moral leadership is a wonderful thing, but it needs to be evidence based. What is the evidence that others are moved one way or the other by our example? We obviously need a study to establish cause and effect. For instance, after the UK passed its climate legislation, how many other countries lowered carbon emissions as a result? What evidence of causation was there that the lowering (such as it was) was caused by our own action?
I suspect that if you just looked at correlation as causation you would come to the conclusion that the UK climate legislation has caused the most disastrous, rapid and prolonged increase in carbon emissions that the world has ever seen. It has been unprecedented.
Sep 24, 2012 at 9:26 AM | Albert Stienstra:
The French call them "éoliennes". How would "Aeolian Generator" suit you (- or AG)?
michel:
... if you just looked at correlation as causation you would come to the conclusion that the UK climate legislation has caused the most disastrous, rapid and prolonged increase in carbon emissions that the world has ever seen.
Excellent point!
Sep 24, 2012 at 11:40 AM | John in France wrote"
"The French call them "éoliennes". How would "Aeolian Generator" suit you (- or AG)?"
Since Aeolus is the god of wind, " wind generator" is very suitable. It is not new; you can buy them under that name for your (sailing-)boat, but also there they are not very successful.
Messenger Sep 24, 2012 at 8:35 AM.
Not the first time David has touted this, in 2006 there was this:
Linked here at www.planetark.com
Not an entirely new idea either.
New Scientist in 1995 had Towards a single carbon currency by Judith Hanna
And it all seems to emulate from M. King Hubbert from around 1937, who would later come up with the Peak Oil Theory.
Maybe it's all coincidence with Carbon-trading being quite a big thing nowadays too?
The Websters definition of a turbine engine seems perfectly to describe a windmill or a wind turbine so I side with Gary :P
Re Milipede:
Does anyone have a memory of "asking" our government to remove carbon from our economy? Does anyone have a secret burning desire to have a cr card that stores carbon points or to pay for the system to be created?
Letwin can do his best to establish moral leadership any time he likes but not with my money.
The report and speech look spot on to me, it would be good to see the event - is the video available yet ? You mentioned it had been filmed on the previous thread.
All this talk of carbon trading confuses me.
Is this the same as Carbon Dioxide or Carbon Lifeforms trading?
I thought the former was what farmers did to grow crops and the latter had been abolished in the first half of the nineteenth century by Wilberforce et Al.
I'd always assumed that carbon trading meant what the old NCB, or De Beers, used to do!
Was Dmitri Mendeleev unaware of the cyclical nature of the elemental table?