Salmond's leap

OilPrice.com features an interview with Scotland's green-energy-obsessed First Minister, Alex Salmond. Here's an excerpt.

Oilprice.com: Scotland is famously doing very well in achieving its renewable energy goals with provisional generation statistics confirming that 2011 was a record year for renewable generation in Scotland, up 28.1 % from the previous record in 2009. Your well publicized target is 100% renewable electricity by 2020. How are you coming along with that? Is this figure really achievable?

Alex Salmond: Our Electricity Generation Policy Statement confirms that our 100% renewable electricity is technically feasible although we are not complacent and accept that it will be challenging. Delivery of the target will require around 16GW of capacity. We currently have almost 5GW operational. With a further 3.3 GW consented or operational and over 20GW in planning or scoping we are confident that the target can be delivered.

These numbers don't seem to quite stack up. Peak demand in Scotland appears to be 6GW, and an optimistic assessment of wind turbine efficiency would be 20% or so. Therefore, to meet peak demand you'd need 30GW of capacity. If Salmond is assuming that he can double the efficiency of wind farms then it's quite a leap.

Quote of the day

Who among us would choose to exchange modernity and its stupendous prosperity for whatever reduction in global temperature we’d enjoy had all the greenhouse gasses emitted over the past 250, 260 years never been released?

Don Boudreaux tries valiantly to bring a CBS radio host back to something resembling reality.

Sporting Fever - Josh 178

Click image for larger version

Just a few of the sporting events that might be happening somewhere near you. I am sure you can think of a few more.

Cartoons by Josh

Keenan and the LIBOR scandal

A few days ago readers were discussing the apparently inability of anyone in the UK establishment to bring anyone to book for any misdemeanour whatsoever. In that vein, Doug Keenan's recent article in the FT seems rather pertinent. Although it's somewhat off-topic for this blog, covering the issues surrounding the recent LIBOR-fixing scandal, the themes of willful ignoring of evidence that might lead the truth being uncovered are obvious. The involvement of the former head of the UK's Committee on Climate Change, Lord Turner, only adds spice.

Update on Aug 10, 2012 by Bishop Hill

An extended version of the article appears here.

Keenan himself is interviewed on the BBC's World Business Report (from 5:10).

Oxburgh still spinning

Lord Oxburgh was interviewed on Australian radio the other day (H/T Australian Climate Madness), discussing global warming science and Climategate.

The interviewer is very impressed that an oil industry man is so convinced of AGW. He also seems well informed about Oxburgh's advisory role to banks and governments. Strangely, however, he doesn't seem to have picked up that Oxburgh is heavily involved in the renewables industry.

Funny that.

Unbelievably hot, not - Josh 177

You couldn't make it up, oh hang on, he just did.

Cartoons by Josh

Wind payback period "several millennia"

ConsumerReport.org is reporting that home wind turbines are a rip-off:

The Honeywell costs $11,000 installed, comes with a five-year warranty and has a 20-year expected product life. But having a thorough site analysis by a manufacturer-authorized installer, backed by your own research on websites such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, is vital.

At the rate the WT6500 is delivering power at our test site, it would take several millennia for the product to pay for itself in savings—not the 56 years it would take even with the 1,155 kWh quote we received.

Political bias in the academy

It has long been known that universities are overwhelmingly staffed by people of a left-wing persuasion, this having been shown by many surveys. According to a report in Inside Higher Ed, a significant proportion of these collectivist professors are happy to use their positions to keep down people of dissenting views.

Just over 37 percent of those surveyed said that, given equally qualified candidates for a job, they would support the hiring of a liberal candidate over a conservative candidate. Smaller percentages agreed that a "conservative perspective" would negatively influence their odds of supporting a paper for inclusion in a journal or a proposal for a grant. (The final version of the paper is not yet available, but an early version may be found on the website of the Social Science Research Network.)

To some on the right, such findings are hardly surprising. But to the authors, who expected to find lopsided political leanings, but not bias, the results were not what they expected.

"The questions were pretty blatant. We didn't expect people would give those answers," said Yoel Inbar, a co-author, who is a visiting assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University, in the Netherlands.

He said that the findings should concern academics. Of the bias he and a co-author found, he said, "I don't think it's O.K."

Politicians need to remember this, next time their chief scientific advisers tell them what they should be doing.

Record spinning

Anthony Watts has been taking a look at the recently proclaimed new temperature record for the USA that it is alleged has just been set. It seems that it may not be a record at all. If you take the brand spanking new USCRN network of temperature stations temperatures are a whole lot lower than with the old, problematic, but strangely still preferred COOP/USHCN network.

Using the old network, NOAA says the USA Average Temperature for July 2012 is: 77.6°F

Using the NOAA USCRN data, the USA Average Temperature for July 2012 is: 75.5°F

The difference between the old problematic network and new USCRN is 2.1°F cooler.

A voice from the ivory tower

Take a listen to Professor Steve Jones on the BBC radio show (link below), The Life Scientific. Discussing his role as head of the BBC Trust's review of the corporation's science output, Jones demonstrates that he has his head well and truly embedded in the sand, arguing, hilariously, that scientists rarely mislead. The occupants of the ivory tower, he would have us believe, are a kind of superbeing above the flaws and tendency towards self-interest that afflict us all.

Hard to credit, isn't it?

Steve Jones on BBC review

Fracking for heat

An article in E&E Greenwire reports that a start-up company in the USA is about to test the use of fracking techniques to access geothermal energy sources:

The company has finished setting up seismic sensors on U.S. Forest Service land near the base of Newberry Volcano, a national monument site about 20 miles south of Bend, Ore. The volcano hasn't erupted in 1,300 years and shows no signs of activity today, but the Earth's heat finds its way to the surface in other ways.

Part of the area's allure to visitors comes from the hot springs at Paulina Lake and East Lake, where the water is warm but not too warm for bathing. About 2 miles underground, though, the temperatures climb above 600 degrees Fahrenheit -- about as hot as the Geysers, where a set of power plants in Northern California generate 1,300 megawatts of electricity, more than at any other hot spot on Earth.

AltaRock will inject 24 million gallons of water at roughly 46 degrees Fahrenheit into these hot rocks to build a large network of small cracks. If all goes according to plan, the company will be able to circulate water through the rock and suck it out of newly drilled wells, scalding hot and ready for use in an eventual power plant.

The eyes of environmentalists all around the world will be lighting up at a new threat to be protested, a new scare to bring in the donations.

Pielke Jr in Foreign Policy mag

Roger Pielke Jr explains the Kaya Identity to readers at Foreign Policy magazine, arguing that it is through technology that progress will be made on the global warming problem:

To secure cheap energy alternatives requires innovation -- technological, but also institutional and social. Nuclear power offers the promise of large scale carbon-free energy, but is currently expensive and controversial. Carbon capture from coal and gas, large-scale wind, and solar each offer tantalizing possibilities, but remain technologically immature and expensive, especially when compared to gas. The innovation challenge is enormous, but so is the scale of the problem. A focus on innovation -- not on debates over climate science or a mythical high carbon price -- is where we'll make [progress].

Madrid 1995 - the last day of climate science

Bernie Lewin has posted the final part of his long history of the 1995 IPCC conference, at which activist scientists managed to fashion a summary for policymakers that told a different story to the scientific report.

Houghton’s ruling means that the integrity of the scientific process would be abandoned and its hard-won authority traded so as to expedite a political end – however virtuous that end might be. If there were others also alarmed by the treatment of the Saudi’s objections, then they must be holding their breath, for their voice is not heard.

Gordon Hughes on the economics of wind power

Gordon Hughes has authored a submission to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee on behalf of GWPF. The subject is wind power. It makes for horrifying reading.

Meeting the UK Government’s target for renewable generation in 2020 will require total wind capacity of 36 GW backed up by 21 GW of open cycle gas plants plus large complementary investments in transmission capacity. Allowing for the shorter life of wind turbines, the investment outlay for this Wind scenario will be about £124 bilion. The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a capital cost of £13 billion.

Or what about this?

Under the most favourable assumptions for wind power, the Wind scenario will reduce emissions of CO2 relative to the Gas scenario by 21 million metric tons in 2020 - 2.6% of the 1990 baseline at an average cost of about £415 per metric ton at 2009 prices. The average cost is far higher than the average price under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme or the floor carbon prices that have been proposed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change. If this is typical of the cost of reducing carbon emissions to meet the UK’s 2020 target, then the total cost of meeting the target would be £120 billion in 2020, or about 6.8% of GDP.

I don't think that anyone expects the committee to even bat an eyelid, let alone pay any attention.

Chris Rapley, cherrypicker

Chris Rapley has clearly decided that if he just repeats the "climate change is causing extreme weather" line just one more time, people will believe him.

Warming doesn’t take place uniformly. In particular, the poles warm more quickly, as is evident from the rapid melting of the Arctic ice. Differential warming changes geographic temperature gradients, leading to shifts and changing volatility in weather patterns. The 0.8 degrees of current warming has made more likely the weather extremes that hit Russian wheat in 2010 and are hitting US maize now.

It's a lovely second sentence. The poles warm more quickly, as shown by the Arctic. And the Antarctic ice, I hear you say?

It doesn't exactly support Rapley's case, does it?

Equally, his case that weather extremes are expected to increase seems strange. If the temperature difference between pole and equator is expected to decrease, then hurricane activity should decrease. Or is Rapley picking and choosing his weather extremes too?