Russian scientists forecast lower temperatures in Arctic after 2020.

Russian scientists forecast lower temperatures in Arctic after 2020. (Tass).

Russian scientists say the air temperature in the Arctic may low not earlier than 2020. Over the past ten years, the Arctic area became warmer by an average of three degrees, expert of the Antarctic Research Institute Valery Karklin told TASS on Tuesday.

"Our forecast is that in the early 2020 the temperature in the Arctic will go lower and will continue getting lower to the 2030-2040s.," he said. "Thus, ice in the Arctic seas will be bigger and the heavy ice conditions will get more often."

"In the recent ten years, due to the warming, the anomalous air temperatures int eh Arctic area (north of 70th latitude) were between 1.7-4 degrees, which means the Arctic area has become warmer by three degrees," he said.

The research institute’s studies show the warming is a part of the cyclic climate changes, with the period of about 60 years. Noteworthy, the warming is due to natural factors, not anthropogenic, the scientists said.

"Various literature sources say the air temperature in the northern hemisphere since 1998 has stabilized and begins going down," the expert said. "In the Arctic, this process has not begun yet." Hmmm.......The Russians are building subs with thicker hull & Tower to break through thicker ice.

'GloBULLwarming Myths' - Climate change helps slow, not quicken, rising sea levels – NASA.

@JohnnyThe6ix Sea level at the Marshall Islands is the same now as it was in 1950.https://t.co/vAMg6pjeVj pic.twitter.com/ye7eZKVTlq

— Steve Goddard (@SteveSGoddard) February 5, 2016

'GloBULLwarming Myths' - Climate change helps slow, not quicken, rising sea levels – NASA. (RT).

Glaciers are still melting, but climate change is having an unexpected effect on sea levels, NASA has found. Satellites show 3.2 trillion tons of water has been stored on land over the past decade, slowing the pace of rising sea levels by 20 percent.

Never before has the climate and weather-driven impact on water storage been so accurately studied. With the help of two satellites, the University of California at Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) determined that through lakes, aquifers, and other routes, land is practically soaking up the liquid like a giant sponge. The study is set to be published on Friday in the journal Science.

Enough water to fill Lake Huron, the seventh largest lake in the world, has been trapped, according to NASA. Before this study, researchers could only faintly guess at how the natural water cycle, or hydrologic cycle, would be impacted by climate change.

“We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean,” the study’s lead author, J.T. Reager of JPL, said on NASA’s website. Reager started the research as a UC Irvine graduate student.

“What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge – at least temporarily. These new data are vital for understanding decadal variations in sea level change. The information will be a critical complement to future long-term projections of sea level rise, which depend on melting ice and warming oceans,” Reager said.

The JPL-UC Irvine study contradicts a study from last year published in the journal Nature, which said the rising rate of sea levels was proceeding 2.5 times faster than it had been in 1990. Read the full story here.

Coming from the same people who tell you not to worry about Iran's nuclear plans.

Coming from the same people who tell you not to worry about Iran's nuclear plans. HT : SteveGoddard

Northern Siberia - New giant holes found in Yamal permafrost.

Northern Siberia - New giant holes found in Yamal permafrost.(RBTH).

Scientists have discovered two huge new holes in the ground on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia, adding to those identified last summer, RIA Novy Region has reported.

Moreover, a grouping of dozens of smaller holes, known to scientists as funnels, has sprung up around one of the earlier discovered craters.

Including those discovered in summer 2014, a total of four huge craters have now been found on the Yamal Peninsula. Environmentalists fear that more funnels may occur near populated areas, which could lead to disasters on a local scale.

The new craters are located approximately 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from Bovanenkovskoye, one of the largest gas condensate fields on the planet.

According to scientists, the formation of the holes is due to emissions of gas trapped under pressure in the upper layers of permafrost. The gas escaped after microcracks appeared in the thick ice because of warming in the polar latitudes.

"I am sure that there are more craters on [the] Yamal [Peninsula], we just need to search for them... I suppose there could be 20 to 30 craters more," Prof. Vasily Bogoyavlensky, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and deputy director of the Moscow-based Oil and Gas Research Institute, told The Siberian Times.

Bogoyavlensky has called for urgent investigation of the new phenomenon amid safety fears. "It is important not to scare people, but to understand that it is a very serious problem and we must research this." 

Doctor of Geological and Minerological Sciences Marina Leibman (of the Earth Cryosphere Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences) supports this gas theory.

“For me the biggest surprise was that the location appeared untouched by any kind of human activity,” Leibman explained to RBTH early in August, commenting on the appearance of the first Yamal holes. “My first thoughts were that this hole was the result of an accident that occurred whilst drilling for natural gas.”

Read more:

How were the ‘mysterious holes’ in the Russian north formed?

Scientists interviewed by RBTH confirm that the mysterious holes on the Yamal Peninsula that have sparked so much interest on the internet have no known analogues on land, but could indicate a serious degradation of the permafrost, with global implications.

'Global Warming' - SNOWY OWLS FROM ARCTIC REGIONS FLEEING, last time seen at the second coldest Winter.

Snowy Owl landing Quebec

'Global Warming' - SNOWY OWLS FROM ARCTIC REGIONS FLEEING , last time seen at the second coldest Winter.(Njspotlight).
Bird-watchers and general public warned to keep their distance, since birds may be underfed and overstressed from long journey south.

New Jersey birders are all aflutter over an influx of snowy owls, Arctic predators that seldom stray into the Garden State but are doing so this winter in numbers that are unprecedented in at least 50 years.

By December 6 around 20 of the birds had been seen at various locations including Stone Harbor Point, Sandy Hook, and Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, starting in late November.

The count sharply exceeds the state’s typical winter tally of zero to three, and is expected to increase as the winter goes on as more birds venture south from their normal wintering grounds in Canada.

“This is really just the beginning,” said Pete Dunne, director of the Cape May Bird Observatory. “When you get an increase this big, typically birds just continue to move in.”

Dunne, a nationally known birding expert, said the birds’ wide dispersion from their normal territory -- known in ornithological circles as an “irruption” -- was unprecedented in his 50 years of birding.

Given the expectation that the owls will continue to arrive, the influx may become the largest since birding records began. “It has the potential to be the biggest irruption ever,” Dunne said. The two previous largest irruptions occurred in the winters of 1890-1891 and 1926-1927.

The birds have clearly been driven south by a shortage of food in their normal wintering habitat, Dunne said, although reasons for the shortage are less clear.

One theory is that the species had a very good breeding season because of an abundance of lemmings -- small rodents that are a major food source for the owls. The resulting population boom means there isn’t enough winter food for all the birds in their regular winter territory, forcing some to fly south.

“There is not enough winter prey to support the expanding population,” Dunne said.

Outside of New Jersey, the birds are appearing in other northeastern states, southeastern Canada, the Great Lakes region, and even Bermuda, said Jeffrey Gordon, president of the American Birding Association.

Snowy Owls -- with distinctive black-and-white patterning and a wing span of more than four feet -- generate excitement among birders at any time because they are big, handsome birds that live in remote regions that most people never visit, Gordon said. The fact that they are now visible in significant numbers, and in unfamiliar habitat like New Jersey, adds to their mystique.

“Most people who watch birds don’t get a chance to see one,” Gordon said. “It’s a reason to celebrate.”Hmmm.......'The two previous largest irruptions occurred in the winters of 1890-1891' .......The winter of 1889 was the second coldest winter in the Netherlands and Belgium in the 19th century and that of 1838, after the coldest since the winter of 1789 revolution Read the full story here.

"Global Warming" - 30 Foot Wall of ice destroys Manitoba homes, cottages.

"Global Warming" -  30 foot Wall of ice destroys Manitoba homes, cottages.(Yahoo).A local state of emergency has been declared in a western Manitoba municipality after homes in Ochre Beach were destroyed and seriously damaged by a wave of lake ice.

Area officials told CBC News the wind pushed built-up ice off Dauphin Lake on Friday evening and caused it to pile up in the community, located on the lake's southern shore.

The piles of ice, which were more than nine metres tall in some cases, destroyed at least six homes and cottages, according to the Rural Municipality of Ochre River.Another 14 homes suffered extensive damage, with some structures knocked off their foundations.

No one was injured.

The same area was devastated by flooding in 2011. Dozens of properties in Ochre Beach and Dauphin Beach were evacuated due to extremely high lake levels that spring.
"They're devastated. Most of these people were hit hard during the flood," Clayton Watts, the deputy reeve of the RM of Ochre River, said Friday night.

"Most of them were back to the stage where they were back living in their homes again, and now this has happened. So they're pretty devastated right now."

Ochre Beach is about 300 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg and 20 kilometres east of Dauphin.Read the full story here.More here.

Video - Weather manipulation? HAARP Busted: Amazing Satellite Imaging showing Wave Spiral coming from a Base!

Video - Weather manipulation? HAARP Busted: Amazing Satellite Imaging showing Wave Spiral coming from a Base!HT: Investmentwatch.

Huge patches of warm air over the Arctic.Arctic sea ice, may well disappear altogether this summer

                                                


Huge patches of warm air over the Arctic.Arctic sea ice, may well disappear altogether this summer.(AN).

Over the past month or so, huge patches with temperature anomalies of over 20 degrees Celsius have been forming over the Arctic.

The three images below show such patches stretch out from Svalbard to Novaya Zemlya (top), north of Eastern Siberia (middle) and over West Greenland and Baffin Bay (bottom).

Paul Beckwith, regular contributor to the Arctic-news blog, comments:

"The problem with this type of pattern is that there is a tendency for what is termed the AD (Arctic Dipole) consisting of exceptionally high pressures over Northern Canada to Greenland. When the air leaves this region heading for the low pressure regions (winds) it curves to the right (due to Coriolis force) and is thus driven from the Bering Strait region to the North Pole and then out Fram Strait, this conduit is like flushing the toilet on the ice. Warm water is pulled to the cold North Pole and the ice is driven out the Fram Strait into the warm Atlantic where it is melted."

"But the really big problem is that this high pressure area over Northern Canada is a ridge (blocking) that stays pretty stationary over the summers and is directly causing the heat waves and drought in the western US (2003, 2011, 2012).
Another really big problem is that the part of the ridge over Greenland (or large GBI = Greenland Blocking Index); as discussed by Overland, Francis, et. al. in 2012 causes excessive melt in Greenland (as we saw in July, 2012 when 97% of Greenland was melting on the surface instead of the usual 40%). This is sending the Greenland albedo into a steep drop, causing even more heat absorption and melting."

Paul adds: "The Greenland high could reach 1070 mb in next few days; that will bring huge temperatures! By comparison, the world record highest was 1085 in Mongolia in December 19, 2001".

Indeed, as the jet stream slows down and becomes more wavier, such patches of warm air can be expected to extend more regularly into the Arctic. The result can be a huge melt of Arctic sea ice, as well as a huge melt of snow cover in Greenland, which also dramatically lowers albedo, as occurred in 2012 and as discussed in the earlier post Greenland is melting at incredible rate.

This spells bad news for the Arctic sea ice, which may well disappear altogether this summer.

Paul further adds: "For the record; I do not think that any sea ice will survive this summer. An event unprecedented in human history is today, this very moment, transpiring in the Arctic Ocean. The cracks in the sea ice that I reported on my Sierra Club Canada blog and elsewhere over the last several days have spread and at this moment the entire sea ice sheet (or about 99% of it) covering the Arctic Ocean is on the move. Clockwise. The ice is thin, and slushy, and breaking apart."

"This is abrupt climate change in real-time. Humans have benefitted greatly from a stable climate for the last 11,000 years or roughly 400 generations. Not any more. We now face an angry climate. One that we have poked in the eye with our fossil fuel stick and awakened. And now we must deal with the consequences. We must set aside our differences and prepare for what we can no longer avoid. And that is massive disruption to our civilizations."Hmmmmm........Shutdown of thermohaline circulation.Read the full story here.

Video - Croatia snowfall shatters record set in 1861.

HT: IceAgeNow

More pictures here.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Video - 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing into the ocean, It’s like watching ‘Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes.

It's like watching 'Manhattan breaking apart in front of your eyes', says filmmaker James Balog. He's describing the largest iceberg calving ever filmed, as featured in his movie, Chasing Ice. After weeks of waiting, the filmakers witnessed 7.4 cubic km of ice crashing off the Ilulissat glacier in Greenland. Chasing Ice, released in the UK on Friday, follows James Balog's mission to document Arctic ice being melted by climate change.HT: LiveLeak.

"Global warming Hits The US" - Low temperature records overwhelm highs in the USA this past week.

"Global warming Hits The US" - Low temperature records overwhelm highs in the USA this past week.(WUWT).

"Hottest year ever" - Cold Alaska summer hurting farmers and fresh produce lovers.

"Hottest year ever" - Cold Alaska summer hurting farmers and fresh produce lovers.(AD). Cold weather in Southcentral Alaska isn't just affecting people's moods. It's seriously hurting vegetable crops in the Matanuska Susitna Valley, one of the state's major farming regions. Most crops are several weeks behind schedule, according to farmers, the result of a chilly spring and a summer that’s nearly breaking cold-temperature records. 
Pyrah's Pioneer Peak Farm, a popular pick-it-yourself destination near Palmer, would normally see five times as many people as it has, says owner Ted Pyrah. There's just not much for customers to pick right now, he says, and most vegetables are small. While farmers can handle cloudy weather and a good amount of rain, there's not much they can do when temperatures dip. Plants simply aren't maturing fast enough, putting many farmers in a lurch. The yield's way down, the production numbers are not there,” says Arthur Keyes, owner of the South Anchorage Farmer's Market and Glacier Valley Farm in Palmer. “It's so cold, we need heat. We don't need rain, we need the sun.”
How many Mat-Su farmers are affected by the cold? How about everybody?” says Duane Clark, co-owner of the Central Market in Anchorage. Name a plant and it's probably behind schedule. Cabbage, potatoes, beets, broccoli, cauliflower. Greens are about the only plant that's consistent, farmers say, and they’ve been small. Even peas, normally a stable cold-weather crop, are lagging. Pyrah says his pea plants just started producing pods. Normally, he would have been harvesting them by July 20. If you haven't seen any giant zucchinis in the farmer's market, there's a reason. Keyes, whose farm mainly produces flowering crops like zucchini and strawberries, says he usually produces one pound of zucchini per plant, per day. But he didn't even begin harvesting the plants on time. Normally peak production is July 1, and Keyes didn't start harvesting until mid-July. Even then, with the ability to produce up to 2,000 pounds of zucchini a day, he only harvested 75. His problems aren't unique. Keyes says many vendors that signed up sell at the market in June didn't show up until July. They just didn't have enough crop to sustain a booth. Even the bees have had trouble with rainy, cold weather, Keyes says, another issue when dealing with flower crops.
While cold is slowing plants in Alaska, the opposite is happening in the Lower 48. According to the U.S. Drought Monitor about 53 percent of the nation is experiencing moderate to extreme drought. More than 1,000 counties in 29 states have been declared disasters areas. Record hot temperatures are being set all over.
Not in Alaska. Alaska’s biggest city of Anchorage just posted its fourth-coldest July on record.
According to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics through July 29, Palmer has only had 325 “degree days” this year, 112 days below average. A degree day is not an actual 24-hour day, but instead a unit of measurement defining ideal growing periods -- periods that are neither too hot nor too cold.
Sue Benz, with the USDA Alaska Agricultural Statistics Service, tried to put that into perspective. In 2004, a great growing year by most accounts (Benz grew full-size apples in her apple trees), there were 640 degree days through the end of July. In 2010, when Anchorage set a record with 28 consecutive days of rain, the degree-day count was still higher, with 372.
The latest data from the USDA shows that 4.6 million pounds of vegetables were grown statewide in 2010. Alaska also saw 15 million pounds of potatoes, which is counted separately from vegetables.With the Midwest drought expected to increase food prices, Consenstein said Alaskans should be concerned. Alaska won't be immune to price hikes. And with less local food around, grocery bills could be painful. "This bad weather (may) be a bit of a wake-up call that we need to pay attention to Alaska's food system," he said.Read the full story here.

PRESS RELEASE new analysis demo that 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled

PRESS RELEASE new analysis demo that 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled.(WUWT).PRESS RELEASE – U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments.
Chico, CA July 29^th, 2012 – 12 PM PDT – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System devised by METEO-France’s Michel Leroy. The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends.

The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled, with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward. 

The paper is the first to use the updated siting system which addresses USHCN siting issues and data adjustments.
The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008, yields a trend of +0.155C per decade from the high quality sites, a +0.248 C per decade trend for poorly sited locations, and a trend of +0.309 C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data. This issue of station siting quality is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network.
Today, a new paper has been released that is the culmination of knowledge gleaned from five years of work by Anthony Watts and the many volunteers and contributors to the SurfaceStations project started in 2007.

This pre-publication draft paper, titled An area and distance weighted analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends, is co-authored by Anthony Watts of California, Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville, is to be submitted for publication.Hmmmm.......Obama: "All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster." Read the full story here.

Destabilization: Scientists discover new unstable region the size of New Jersey under Antarctica Ice Sheet.

Destabilization: Scientists discover new unstable region the size of New Jersey under Antarctica Ice Sheet.(UTA).May 10, 2012 – ANTARTICA - Using ice-penetrating radar instruments flown on aircraft, a team of scientists from the U.S. and U.K. have uncovered a previously unknown sub-glacial basin nearly the size of New Jersey beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) near the Weddell Sea. The location, shape and texture of the mile-deep basin suggest that this region of the ice sheet is at a greater risk of collapse than previously thought. Team members at The University of Texas at Austin compared data about the newly discovered basin to data they previously collected from other parts of the WAIS that also appear highly vulnerable, including Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glacier. Although the amount of ice stored in the new basin is less than the ice stored in previously studied areas, it might be closer to a tipping point. “If we were to invent a set of conditions conducive to retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, this would be it,” said Don Blankenship, senior research scientist at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and co-author on the new paper. “With its smooth bed that slopes steeply toward the interior, we could find no other region in West Antarctica more poised for change than this newly discovered basin at the head of the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. The only saving grace is that losing the ice over this new basin would only raise sea level by a small percentage of the several meters that would result if the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet destabilized.”
The study’s co-authors also included Duncan Young, research scientist associate at the Institute for Geophysics. The study, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience, was carried out in a collaboration led by the University of Edinburgh with the British Antarctic Survey and the Universities of Aberdeen, Exeter and York, as well as The University of Texas at Austin. “This is a significant discovery in a region of Antarctica that at present we know little about,” said Professor Martin Siegert of the University of Edinburgh, who led the project. “The area is on the brink of change, but it is impossible to predict what the impact of this change might be without further work enabling better understanding of how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet behaves.” The seaward edge of the newly discovered basin lies just inland of the ice sheet’s grounding line, where streams of ice flowing toward the sea begin to float. Two features of the basin, which is entirely below sea level, are particularly worrisome to scientists: First, like a cereal bowl, its edges slope down steeply. If the grounding line begins to retreat upstream, seawater will replace it and more ice will begin to float. The study’s authors predict that this positive feedback mechanism would sustain retreat of the ice sheet until eventually all of the ice filling the basin goes afloat. Second, the bed of the basin on which the ice rests is smooth. There are few big bumps, or “pinning points,” to hold back sliding ice. The newly discovered basin covers 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 square miles), nearly the size of New Jersey, and is well below sea level, nearly 2 kilometers (about 1.2 miles) deep in places.Read the full story here.

How Green Was My Bankruptcy?

How Green Was My Bankruptcy?(WUWT).By David Middleton.My apologies to the memories of the late Richard Llewellyn and late John Ford; but I just had to borrow their title for this post. This paragraph from a 2010 Telegraph article really says it all…

Its 500,000 photovoltaic panels will generate 30 megawatts of electricity, enough, in the popular measurement, to power 9,000 homes. It is costing about $250 million to build, significantly less than a gas, coal or nuclear power station, which can easily exceed $1 billion. And it represents a sea-change in America’s energy business.
America has been notoriously devoted to hydrocarbon fuels. Big Oil, Big Coal and big Texan hats in the White House were seen by the rest of the world to be keeping it so, whatever the global interest. Oil barons funnelled money to scientists ready to pour doubt on the science of climate change, and conservative Republicans led the charge to pour scorn on those such as the former Democrat vice-president Al Gore who were urging Americans to rethink where their energy was coming from.

The power plant described in the preceding passage is the Cimarron Solar Facility, built on Ted Turner’s 590,823 acre ranch in northern New Mexico. It is indeed true that most natural gas- and coal-fired power plants cost a lot more than $250 million to build. However, it’s also true that most natural gas- and coal-fired power plants have nameplate generating capacities a bit larger than 30 MW…

TVA to build natural gas power plant
By DUNCAN MANSFIELD, Associated Press
Posted June 4, 2009
KNOXVILLE — The Tennessee Valley Authority on Thursday decided to build an $820 million natural gas power plant in northeastern Tennessee to comply with a North Carolina lawsuit over air quality.
The 880-megawatt combined-cycle gas plant would be as large as the 1950s-era, coal-fired John Sevier plant in Rogersville that a federal judge has targeted for new pollution controls on North Carolina’s behalf.
[...]
LINK

• $820 million divided by 880 MW works out to $931,818 per MW.
• $250 million divided by 30 MW works out to $8,333,333 per MW.

Assuming that the gas-fired plant managed an 85% capacity factor and a 30-yr plant lifetime, the initial capital expenditure would work out to $0.004/kWh… A bit less than half-a-cent per kilowatt-hour. Assuming a 25% capacity factor and a 30-yr plant lifetime for the Cimarron Solar Facility, the initial capital expenditure works out to $0.127/kWh… Almost 13 cents per kilowatt-hour! The average residential electricity rate in the US is currently around 12 cents per kWh… That’s the retail price. As a consumer of electricity, I know which plan I would pick. I’m currently paying about 9 cents per kWh. I sure as heck wouldn’t seek out a provider who would have to raise my current rate by about 50% just to cover their plant construction costs.
Solar photovoltaic electricity is bankruptcy the green way writ large. Here in Texas, Austin Energy has agreed to a long-term purchase agreement to pay $10 million a year for 25 years, for the electricity generated by the Webberville Solar Farm. That works out to more than 15 cents per kWh.

                                                           Full scale picture here.


In concert with his efforts to drive up the cost of coal- and natural gas-fired power plants, President Obama has aggressively pursued an agenda of financing expensive power plants with taxpayer dollars. Many of these taxpayer-guaranteed loans have gone to financially strapped companies, lacking the means to repay those loans. In most cases local utilities were coerced or enticed into signing long-term purchase agreements to buy electricity at nearly double the cost of coal- and natural gas-generated electricity. The sole justification for this “green” centralized industrial policy is the Lysenko-like junk science of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
The economics of this “green” centralized industrial policy are mind numbingly horrible.

                                                      Full scale picture here.

The capex for solar power plants averages between $6- and $7-million per MW of installed capacity. Coal-fired plants generally run less than $2-million per MW and natural gas plants currently run less than $1-million per MW. The average retail residential electricity rate in the U.S. is currently less than 12¢ per kWh. The levelized generation cost for the plants being financed by the Obama administration is more than 20¢ per kWh. His “green” centralized industrial policy will drive the wholesale cost of electricity to nearly double the current retail rate.
One need not literally seize the assets of businesses and install gov’t bureaucrats into management position to effectively nationalize those businesses. All it takes is to make them dependent on gov’t and/or direct their activities through regulatory constraints.Hmmmm.......Obama: "All the Choices We've Made Have Been the Right Ones".Read the full story here.

About David Middleton

I have been a geoscientist in the evil oil and gas industry for almost 30 years. My favorite hobby is debunking the junk science of the radical environmentalists...Particularly the junk science of anthropogenic global warming.    

Global Cooling: be afraid........be very afraid.

Global Cooling: be afraid........be very afraid.(Telegraph).In Perth, Australia I'm staying with one of the country's most brilliant polymaths David Archibald. This morning, he treated to me to a scary presentation he recently delivered to the Institute of World Policy in Washington DC, where he is a visiting fellow. The title is Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, representing the four threats which Archibald believes are the ones we should most fear. The four horsemen, i.e. great challenges the world will soon have to face, are: a decreasing extraction of oil, causing growing prices of energy and, by extension, food; Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, which threatens proliferation and, perhaps, even a nuclear war in the region; rapid population growth in the Middle East and North Africa coupled with higher food imports in those regions, which spells mass starvation; and a 210-year climate cooling cycle. I'm not sure I'm quite as pessimistic as Archibald is on peak oil and shale gas – the latter, he estimates, is only good for another twenty years (the real energy solution, he reckons, is thorium reactors). But the area where I really hope he is wrong is on global cooling. If his analysis of declining sunspot activity is correct, then global mean temperatures are going to decline by about 2 degrees C by 2040 – completely undoing all that lovely beneficial (but rather meagre 0.8 degrees C) global warming we have experienced in the last 150 years. It will mean longer, colder winters and cooler summers. But far worse than the discomfort will be the effect it has on grain production. The shift in latitudes at which corn and wheat can be grown will be the equivalent of losing a belt 300 kilometres wide all around the world, leading to the loss perhaps 400 million tonnes per annum of grain. The result will be rising food prices, grain shortages – and a 50 per cent likelihood of the kind of volcanic-influenced disaster that led to the horrors of the 1816 Year Without A Summer, precipitating crop failures, weird Turner sunsets, and 200,000 deaths in Europe alone. Still there will be at least one consolation. Phil Jones, Michael Mann, James Hansen and Al Gore will all, most likely, still be around to see their entire religious belief system collapsing around their ears.Read and see the full story here.