Carbon Scam!

The Truth About the Faux-Green Renewables Scam!

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Carbon Footprint of Wind Turbines

This is a thought provoking essay from an Australian website called “Andy’s Rant”. 

http://www.andysrant.com/ ; His carbon focus is mostly on the base but frequently the question has come up about what goes into the base and the fact that manufacturing cement is a heavy carbon emitting process.  I thank him for that analysis alone.  He also states what I have been saying all along in this battle to educate the public about the false promises of wind:  “wind turbines will incur far more carbon dioxide emissions in their manufacture and installation than what their operational life will ever save.”

Measures are metric, so if you don’t think in metric, open another window and set up a metric converter (meters to feet, etc.)

So What’s the Carbon Footprint of a Wind Turbine

with 45 Tons of Rebar and 481 M3 of Concrete?

Its carbon footprint is massive – try 241.85 tons of CO2.

Here’s the breakdown of the CO2 numbers.

To create a 1,000 Kg of pig iron, you start with 1,800 Kg of iron ore, 900 Kg of coking coal 450 Kg of limestone. The blast furnace consumes 4,500 Kg of air. The temperature at the core of the blast furnace reaches nearly 1,600 degrees C (about 3,000 degrees F).

The pig iron is then transferred to the basic oxygen furnace to make steel.

1,350 Kg of CO2 is emitted per 1,000 Kg pig iron produced.

A further 1,460 Kg CO2 is emitted per 1,000 Kg of Steel produced so all up 2,810 Kg CO2 is emitted. 

45 tons of rebar (steel) are required so that equals 126.45 tons of CO2 are emitted.

To create a 1,000 Kg of Portland cement, Calcium carbonate (60%), silicon (20%), aluminium (10%), iron (10%) and very small amounts of other ingredients are heated in a large kiln to over 1,500 degrees C to convert the raw materials into clinker. The clinker is then interground with other ingredients to produce the final cement product. When cement is mixed with water, sand and gravel forms the rock-like mass know as concrete.

An average of 927 Kg of CO2 is emitted per 1,000 Kg of Portland cement. On average, concrete has 10% cement, with the balance being gravel (41%), sand (25%), water (18%) and air (6%). One cubic metre of concrete weighs approx. 2,400 Kg so approx. 240 Kg of CO2 is emitted for every cubic metre.

481m3 of concrete are required so that equals 115.4 tons of CO2 are emitted.

Now I have not included the emissions of the mining of the raw materials or the transportation of the fabricated materials to the turbine site so the emission calculation above would be on the low end at best.

Extra stats about wind turbines you may not know about:

The average towering wind turbine being installed around beautiful Australia right now is over 80 metres in height (nearly the same height as the pylons on the Sydney Harbour Bridge). The rotor assembly for one turbine – that’s the blades and hub – weighs over 22,000 Kg and the nacelle, which contains the generator components, weighs over 52,000 Kg.

All this stands on a concrete base constructed from 45,000 Kg of reinforcing rebar which also contains over 481 cubic metres of concrete (that’s over 481,000 litres of concrete – about 20% of the volume of an Olympic swimming pool).

Each turbine blade is made of glass fibre reinforced plastics, (GRP), i.e. glass fibre reinforced polyester or epoxy and on average each turbine blade weighs around 7,000 Kg each.

Each turbine has three blades so there’s 21,000 Kgs of GRP and each blade can be as long as 50 metres.

A typical wind farm of 20 turbines can extend over 101 hectares of land (1.01 Km2).

Each and every wind turbine has a magnet made of a metal called neodymium. There are 2,500 Kg of it in each of the behemoths that have just gone up around Australia.

The mining and refining of neodymium is so dirty and toxic – involving repeated boiling in acid, with radioactive thorium as a waste product – that only one country does it – China.  

All this for an intermittent highly unreliable energy source.

And I haven’t even considered the manufacture of the thousands of pylons and tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission wire needed to get the power to the grid. And what about the land space needed to house thousands of these bird chomping death machines?

You see, renewables like wind turbines will incur far more carbon dioxide emissions in their manufacture and installation than what their operational life will ever save.

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t the “cure” of using wind turbines sound worse than the problem? A bit like amputating your leg to “cure” your in-growing toe nail?

 

Climate Alarmists are Terrified that Their Faux-Green Subsidies Will Dry Up!

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Climate alarmists never quit

 

fear dice

July 31, 2014 by , 

In the same way Americans are discovering that the Cold War that was waged from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is not over, Americans continue to be subjected to the endless, massive, global campaign to foist the hoax of global warming–now called climate change—on everyone.

The campaign’s purpose to convince everyone that it is humans, not the sun, oceans, and other natural phenomenon, and that requires abandoning fossil fuels in favor of “renewable” wind and solar energy.

It is not surprising that climate alarmists, who desire above all else blind allegiance to their cause, would demand all school teachers toe the ‘official party line’ and quash any dissent on the subject of man-made global warming in their classroom,” says Craig Rucker, the Executive Director of co-founder of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). “What is absurd is that any teacher or free-thinking person for that matter would listen to them.”

These days when I am challenged regarding my views about global warming, climate change or energy I send the individual to www.climatedepot.com  and www.energydepot.com, two constantly updated websites filled with links to information on these topics. Both are maintained by CFACT.

It’s not just our classrooms where Green indoctrination goes on. It is also our news media that continue to distort every weather event to advance the hoax. Guiding and feeding them is a massive complex of organizations led by the United Nations—the International Panel on Climate Change—that maintains the hoax to frighten people worldwide in order to achieve “one world order.”

On September 23, heads of state, including President Obama, will gather in New York City for what the Sierra Club calls “a historic summit on climate change. With our future on the line, we will take a weekend and use it to bend the course of history” to save the world from “the ravages of climate change.” Does the Left truly believe it can tax, redistribute and regulate the world to an ideal temperature?  This is absurd.

One of the leading Leftist organizations, the Center for American Progress, focused on the July 14 Major Economics Forum in Paris, offered four items for its agenda. Claiming that “the Arctic is warming two times faster than any other region on earth”, they wanted policy changes based on this falsehood. They blamed climate change for “global poverty” and wanted further reductions in so-called greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. The enemy, as far as they were concerned was energy use.

Mary Hutzler, a senior research fellow of the Institute for Energy Research, testified before a July 22nd meeting of the Senate Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Development and Foreign Assistance, that due to Europe’s green energy (wind and solar) policies, industrial electricity prices are two-to-five times higher than in the U.S. and that, by 2020, 1.4 million European households will be added to those experiencing energy poverty.

There are lessons to be learned, for example, from Spain’s investment in wind energy that caused the loss of four jobs for the electricity it produced and 13 jobs for every megawatt of solar energy. In Germany, the cost of electricity is three times higher than average U.S. residential prices. Little wonder that European nations are now slashing wind and solar programs.

Billions Wasted to Combat Global Warming

In the U.S., the Obama administration used its “stimulus” to fund Solyndra—$500 million dollars—and fifty other Green energy projects that have failed or are on their way to failure. Undeterred with this appalling record, on July 3 the Energy Department announced $4 billion for “projects that fight global warming.”

But there is no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for seventeen years and it shows no indication of ending anytime soon. This is the same administration that has waged a war on coal, forcing the closure of many plants that produced electricity efficiently and affordably, and had throughout the last century.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2014 weather highlights showed that, from January to June, the temperature in the U.S. has risen by a miniscule 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the average temperature for the 20th century. NOAA also noted that recorded temperatures for the first half of 2014 are the coldest since 1993 when the cooling cycle began. The exception to this has been California.

Brainwashed for decades about global warming, 20% of likely voters, according to a July Rasmussen poll, still believe that global warming is not over, colder weather or not, 17% were not sure, but fully 63% disagreed!

The results of a Pew Research Center poll in June revealed that 35% of Americans say there is not enough solid evidence to suggest mankind is warming the Earth while another 18% says the world has warmed due to “natural patterns”, not human activity. Pew found that liberals remain convinced that humans are to blame, but the bottom line is that 53% disputed the President’s claims.

That means that a growing numbers of Americans are now skeptics.

In the months to come we will see marches and meetings intended to further the global warming hype.  The good news is that fewer Americans are being influenced by such efforts.

– See more at: http://www.cfact.org/2014/07/31/climate-alarmists-never-quit/?utm_source=CFACT+Updates&utm_campaign=b826f6dbb4-Facts_vs_fear8_1_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a28eaedb56-b826f6dbb4-270050433#sthash.o1jqDV6b.dpuf

Too Many People Trying to Cover Up the Truth about our Climate!

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PROFESSOR QUITS FIVETHIRTYEIGHT BLOG AFTER ANTI-GLOBAL WARMING ARTICLE BACKLASH

 
by 29 Jul 2014 127POST A COMMENT
 

Environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. has quit Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog over a controversy that arose after he wrote a post denying that global warming is responsible for the increasing costs of recovery from natural disasters.

Pielke, a professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), reported to Discover Magazinethat over the last month he began to find that his work was being rejected by FiveThirtyEight. So, he told editor Mike Wilson that he quit.

The controversy grew after Pielke posted a March 19 story he entitled, “Disasters Cost More Than Ever–But Not Because of Climate Change.”

As soon as he posted the piece, the laymen critics in Silver’s audience began to attack him for daring to deviate from the idea that global warming causes all of the earth’s ills.

In his interview at Discovery, Pielke lamented the editorial cowardice of Nate Silver, who sat back and allowed Pielke’s critics to go so far as to organize an effort to have him fired at the blog, not to mention ultimately showing reluctance to support him by posting new pieces.

“I do wish that 538 had shown a bit more editorial backbone, but hey, it is his operation. If a widely published academic cannot publish on a subject which he has dozens of peer-reviewed papers and 1000s of citations to his work, what can he write on?” Pielke said.

The professor also said that he has a suspicion that Silver “knows very well where the evidence lies on this topic” but refused to fully support him over the whole thing for whatever reason.

Pielke also criticized the whole atmosphere at the blog, saying, “For me, if the price of playing in the DC-NYC data journalism world is self-censorship for fear of being unpopular, then it is clearly not a good fit for any academic policy scholar.”

Pielke was pilloried as a global warming denier–something he most decidedly is not–by such luminaries as Paul Krugman, Slate, and others after the original post went viral. Pielke said that he was shocked at how some of these people and outlets lied about him.

As he told Discovery, “It is remarkable to see people like Paul Krugman and John Holdren brazenly make completely false claims in public about my work and my views. That they make such false claims with apparently no consequences says something about the nature of debate surrounding climate.”

Pielke also noted that too often in the global warming debate people on the left side of the argument resort to name calling almost immediately: “There is a common strategy of delegitimization used in the climate debates. It seems that labeling someone a ‘denier’ offers a convenient excuse to avoid taking on arguments on their merits and to call for certain voices to be banished.”

But despite the attacks on him, Pielke says that the whole controversy probably hasn’t hurt his standing in the academic community too much.

“Ultimately, what I learned from the 538 episode is how small and insular the community of self-professed ‘climate hawks’ actually is,” Pielke insisted. “Sure they made a lot of noise online and got Jon Stewart’s attention. But that was because of Nate Silver’s fame, not mine. Back in the real world, outside the climate blogosphere and the NY-DC data journalism circle virtually no one knew or much cared about the 538 brouhaha, even within academia. I found that encouraging.”

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston 

Windweasels Cause a Multitude of Horrific Problems….

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Wind Power Sends German Power Market Into Chaos

July 31, 2014 by  

Gaza_Blackout_Main_pic_1

With the introduction of unreliable and intermittent wind power comes the risk of widespread blackouts, social and economic chaos. However, to avoid the consequences, grid managers in Germany are paying conventional generators huge premiums to compensate for wind power “outages” – and the costs of doing so are starting to bite – not that the generators mind. Keeping chaos at bay has created opportunities to milk the system for what it’s worth – with some very handsome upside for savvy marketeers.

Here’s Bloomberg on the market debacle created by German wind power.

German Utilities Bail Out Electric Grid at Wind’s Mercy
Julia Mengewein
Bloomberg Businessweek
25 July 2014

Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that the government is paying more utilities than ever to help stabilize the country’s electricity grid.

Twenty power companies including Germany’s biggest utilities, EON SE and RWE AG, now get fees for pledging to add or cut electricity within seconds to keep the power system stable, double the number in September, according to data from the nation’s four grid operators. Utilities that sign up to the 800 million-euro ($1.1 billion) balancing market can be paid as much as 400 times wholesale electricity prices, the data show.

Germany’s drive to almost double power output from renewables by 2035 has seen one operator reporting five times as many potential disruptions as four years ago, raising the risk of blackouts in Europe’s biggest electricity market while pushing wholesale prices to a nine-year low. More utilities are joining the balancing market as weak prices have cut operating margins to 5 percent on average from 15 percent in 2004, with RWE reporting its first annual loss since 1949.

“At the beginning, this market counted for only a small portion of our earnings,” said Hartmuth Fenn, the head of intraday, market access and dispatch at Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest utility. “Today, we earn 10 percent of our plant profits in the balancing market” in Germany, he said by phone from Hamburg July 22.

Price Plunge

In Germany’s daily and weekly balancing market auctions, winning bidders have been paid as much as 13,922 euros to set aside one megawatt depending on the time of day, grid data show. Participants stand ready to provide power or cut output in notice periods of 15 minutes, 5 minutes or 30 seconds, earning fees whether their services are needed or not.

German wholesale next-year electricity prices have plunged 60 percent since 2008 as green power, which has priority access to the grid, cut into the running hours of gas, coal and nuclear plants. The year-ahead contract traded at 35.71 euros a megawatt-hour as of 3:54 p.m. on the European Energy Exchange AG in Leipzig, Germany.

Lawmakers last month backed a revision of a the country’s clean-energy law to curb green subsidies and slow gains in consumer power prices that are the second-costliest in the European Union. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s energy switch from nuclear power aims to boost the share of renewables to at least 80 percent by 2050 from about 29 percent now.

Power Premium

Jochen Schwill and Hendrik Saemisch, both 33, set up Next Kraftwerke GmbH in 2009 to sell power from emergency generators in hospitals to the power grid. Today, the former University of Cologne researchers employ about 80 people and have 1,000 megawatts from biomass plants to gas units at their disposal, or the equivalent capacity of a German nuclear plant.

“That was really the core of our founding idea,” Schwill said by phone from Cologne July 21. “That the boost in renewable energy will make supply more intermittent and balancing power more lucrative in the long run.”

Thomas Pilgram, who has sold balancing power since 2012 as chief executive officer of Clean Energy Sourcing in Leipzig, Germany, expects the wave of new entrants to push down balancing market payments.

“New participants are flooding into the market now, which means that prices are coming under pressure,” Pilgram said. “Whoever comes first, gets a slice of the cake, the others don’t because prices have slumped.”

Increased Competition

German grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur welcomes the increase in balancing market participants.

“That’s in our interest as we want to encourage competition in this market,” Armasari Soetarto, a spokeswoman for the Bonn-based authority, said by phone July 18. “More supply means lower prices and that means lower costs for German end users.”

The average price for capacity available within five minutes has dropped to 1,109 euros a megawatt in the week starting July 14, from 1,690 euros in the second week of January, Next Kraftwerke data show. Payments for cutting output within 15 minutes dropped to 361 euros from 1,615 euros in January.

The number of participants has increased as the country’s four grid operators refined how capacity is allocated. In 2007, the grids started one common auction and shortened the bidding periods. Since 2011, power plant operators commit their 5-minute capacity on a weekly basis instead of a month before.
Bloomberg Business week

The same conditions that allow rorting and gaming of the power market in Germany exist in Australia: huge fluctuations in wind power output – with almost daily collapses – allows sharp operators to cash in, with grid managers entirely at their mercy. During wind power “outages” the dispatch price has rocketed from around $40 per MWh to the regulated cap of $12,500 per MWh – see our post: the Great Watt and Pole Swindle.

Wind power has provided Australian generators with the perfect “cover” for pricing tactics of the kind that helped Enron make a killing in the Californian power market during the late 1990s (see our post here.).

The end of the mandatory RET can’t come soon enough.

electricity-price-rise

The Devil Was in The Details, When the EPA Came up With This Scam!

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0.02°C Temperature Rise Averted: The Vital Number Missing from the EPA’s “By the Numbers” Fact Sheet

By PAUL C. “CHIP” KNAPPENBERGER and PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

Last week, the Obama Administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a new set of proposed regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing U. S. power plants. The motivation for the EPA’s plan comes from the President’s desire to address and mitigate anthropogenic climate change.

We hate to be the party poopers, but the new regulations will do no such thing.

The EPA’s regulations seek to limit carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production in the year 2030 to a level 30 percent below what they were in 2005. It is worth noting that power plant CO2 emissions already dropped by about 15% from 2005 to2012, largely, because of market forces which favor less-CO2-emitting natural gas over coal as the fuel of choice for producing electricity. Apparently the President wants to lock in those gains and manipulate the market to see that the same decline takes place in twice the time.  Nothing like government intervention to facilitate market inefficiency. But we digress.

The EPA highlighted what the plan would achieve in their “By the Numbers” Fact Sheet that accompanied their big announcement.

For some reason, they left off their Fact Sheet how much climate change would be averted by the plan. Seems like a strange omission since, after all, without the threat of climate change, there would be no one thinking about the forced abridgement of our primary source of power production in the first place, and the Administration’s new emissions restriction scheme wouldn’t even be a gleam in this or any other president’s eye.

But no worries.  What the EPA left out, we’ll fill in.

Using a simple, publically-available, climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA’s new carbon dioxide restrictions*.

The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.

0.018°C to be exact.

We’re not even sure how to put such a small number into practical terms, because, basically, the number is so small as to be undetectable.

Which, no doubt, is why it’s not included in the EPA Fact Sheet.

It is not too small, however, that it shouldn’t play a huge role in every and all discussions of the new regulations.

*********

* Details and Additional Information about our Calculation

We have used the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC)—a simple climate model emulator that was, in part, developed through support of the EPA—to examine the climate impact of proposed regulations.

MAGICC version 6 is available as an on-line tool.

We analyzed the climate impact of the new EPA regulations by modifying future emissions scenarios that have been established by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to reflect the new EPA proposed emissions targets.

Specifically, the three IPCC scenarios we examined were the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) named RCP4.5, RCP 6.0 and RCP8.5.  RCP4.5 is a low-end emissions pathway, RCP6.0 is more middle of the road, and RCP8.5 is a high-end pathway.

The emissions prescriptions in the RCPs are not broken down on a country by country basis, but rather are defined for country groupings.  The U.S. is included in the OECD90 group.

To establish the U.S. emissions pathway within each RPC, we made the following assumptions:

1) U.S. carbon dioxide emissions make up 50 percent of the OECD90 carbon dioxide emissions.

2) Carbon dioxide emissions from electrical power production make up 40 percent of the total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

Figure 1 shows the carbon dioxide emissions pathways of the original RCPs along with our determination within each of the contribution from U.S. electricity production.

 

Figure 1. Carbon dioxide emissions pathways defined in, or derived from, the original set of Representative Concentration pathways (RCPs), for the global total carbon dioxide emissions as well as for the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to U.S. electricity production.

As you can pretty quickly tell, the projected contribution of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production to the total global carbon dioxide emissions is vanishingly small.

The new EPA regulations apply to the lower three lines in Figure 1.

To examine the impact of the EPA proposal, we replace the emissions attributable to U.S. power plants in the original RCPs with targets defined in the new EPA regulations. We determined those targets to be (according to the EPA’s Regulatory Impacts Analysis accompanying the regulation), 0.4864 GtC in 2020 and 0.4653 GtC in 2030.  Thereafter, the U.S. power plant emissions were held constant at the 2030 levels until they fell below those levels in the original RCP prescriptions (specifically, that occurred in 2060 in RPC4.5, 2100 in RCP6.0, and sometime after 2150 in RCP8.5).

We then used MAGICC to calculate the rise in global temperature projected to occur between now and the year 2100 when with the original RCPs as well as with the RCPs modified to reflect the EPA proposed regulations (we used the MAGICC default value for the earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity (3.0°C)).

The output from the six MAGICC runs is depicted as Figure 2.

Figure 2. Global average surface temperature anomalies, 2000-2100, as projected by MAGICC run with the original RCPs as well as with the set of RCPs modified to reflect the EPA 30% emissions reductions from U.S power plants.

In case you can’t tell the impact by looking at Figure 2 (since the lines are basically on top of one another), we’ve summarized the numbers in Table 1.

 

In Table 2, we quantify the amount of projected temperature rise that is averted by the new EPA regulations.

 

The rise in projected future temperature rise that is averted by the proposed EPA restrictions of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants is less than 0.02°C between now and the end of the century assuming the IPCC’s middle-of-the-road future emissions scenario.

While the proposed EPA plan seeks only to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, in practice, the goal is to reduce the burning of coal. Reducing the burning of coal will have co-impacts such as reducing other climatically active trace gases and particulate matter (or its precursors). We did not model the effects of changes in these co-species as sensitivity tests using MAGICC indicate the collective changes in these co-emissions are quite small and largely cancel each other out.

 

Carbon Tax….Nothing But a Huge Rip-off!

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The Carbon TAX Scam

Written by Alan Caruba, Warning Signs on 30 July 2014.

scamIn a recent appearance before a congressional committee, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told them that the agency’s proposed sweeping carbon-regulation plan was “really an investment opportunity. This is not about pollution control.”

If the plan isn’t about pollution, the primary reason for the EPA’s existence, why bother with yet more regulation of something that is not a pollutant—carbon dioxide—despite the Supreme Court’s idiotic decision that it is. Yes, even the Court gets things wrong.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is vital to all life on Earth, but most particularly to every piece of vegetation that grows on it. Top climatologists tell me that it plays a very small role, if any, in the Earth’s climate or weather. Why would anyone expect a gas that represents 400 parts per million of all atmospheric gases, barely 0.04% of all atmospheric gases to have the capacity to affect something as huge and dynamic as the weather or climate?

When something as absurd as the notion the U.S. must drastically reduce its CO2 emissions is told often enough by a wide range of people that include teachers, the media, scientists, politicians, and the President, people can be forgiven for believing this makes sense.

What Gina McCarthy was demonstrating is her belief that not only the members of Congress are idiots, but all the rest of us are as well.

Faking Climate Data

“The science is clear. The risks are clear. We must act…” Sorry, Gina, a recent issue of Natural News, citing the Real Sciencewebsite, reported “(in) what might be the largest scientific fraud ever uncovered, NASA and the NOAA have been caught red-handed altering historical temperature data to produce a ‘climate change narrative’ that defies reality.”  As reported in The Telegraph, a London daily, “NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network has been ‘adjusting’ its record by replacing real temperatures with data ‘fabricated’ by computer models.”

The EPA has been on the front lines of destroying coal-fired plants that produce the bulk of the nation’s electricity, claiming, like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth that coal is “dirty” and must be eliminated from any use.

On July 29, CNSnews reported that “For the first time ever, the average price for a kilowatthour of electricity in the United States has broken through the 14-cent mark, climbing to a record 14.3 cents in June, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

A Carbon Tax

What the Greens want most of all is a carbon tax; that is to say, a tax on CO2 emissions. It is one of the most baseless, destructive taxes that could be imposed on Americans and we should take a lesson from the recent experience that Australians had when, after being told by a former prime minister, Julia Gillard, that she would not impose the tax, she did.They get rid of her andthen got rid of the tax!

As Daniel Simmons, the vice president of policy at the American Energy Alliance, wrote in Roll Call “Australia is now the first country to eliminate its carbon tax. In doing so, it struck a blow in favor of sound public policy.”  Initiated in 2012, the tax had imposed a $21.50 charge (in U.S. dollars), increasing annually, on each ton of carbon dioxide emitted by the country’s power plants.” At the time President Obama called it “good for the world”, but Australians quickly found it was not good for them or their economy.

Favored by several Democratic Senators that include New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen, Alaska’s Mark Begich, and North Carolina’s Kay Hagan, the Heritage Foundation, based on data provided by the Energy Information Administration, took a look at the impact that a proposed U.S. carbon tax would have and calculated that it “would cut a family of four’s income by nearly $2,000 a year while increasing its electricity bills by more than $500 per year. It would increase gas prices by 50 cents per gallon. It could eliminate more than a million jobs in the first few years.”

Simmons noted that “It only took (Australians) two years of higher prices, fewer jobs, and no environmental benefits before they abandoned their carbon tax.”

We don’t need, as Gina McCarthy told the congressional committee, “investments in renewables and clean energy” because billions were wasted by Obama’s “stimulus” and by the grants and other credits extended to wind and solar energy in America. They are the most expensive, least productive, and most unpredictable forms of energy imaginable, given that neither the wind nor the sun is available full-time in the way fossil fuel generated energy is. Both require backup from coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy plants.

In addition to all the other White House efforts to saddle Americans with higher costs, it has now launched a major effort to push its “climate change” agenda with a carbon tax high on its list. A July 29 article in The Hill reported that “Obama is poised to sidestep Congress with a new set of executive actions on climate change.”

If we don’t jump-start our economy by tapping into the jobs and revenue our vast energy reserves represent, secure our southern border, and elect a Congress that will rein in the President, the U.S. risks becoming a lawless banana republic. Carbon taxes are one more nail in the national coffin.

Bjorn Lomborg Testifies at Senate Hearing, Regarding Climate Change!

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Lomborg’s Senate testimony

Posted on July 30, 2014 

by Judith Curry

Because   there   is   no   good, cheap   green   energy,   the   almost   universal  political  choices   have   been   expensive   policies   that   do   very   little. There   is   much   greater   scope   for   climate   policies to   make   the   total   climate   cost   greater   through  the   21st   century. – Bjorn Lomborg

Yesterday the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety convened a Hearing on Examining the Threats Posed by Climate Change.  The Hearing website is [here].

There is no majority or minority statements or opening remarks on the web page.  Six individuals presented testimony, five of whom I am unfamiliar with.  I’ve read all the testimonies.  They’re all interesting, but I think Lomborg’s testimony is important.  I had the priviledge of testifying with Lomborg previously this year at this Hearing.

Lomborg’s testimony can be found [here].  From the Summary:

Global warming is real, but a problem, not the end of the world. Claims of “catastrophic” costs are ill founded. Inaction has costs, but so does action. It is likely that climate action will lead   to higher total costs in this century.   Climate action through increased energy costs will likely harm the poor the   most, both in rich and poor countries.

  • The cumulative cost of inaction towards the end of the century is about 1.8% of GDP
  • While this is not trivial, it by no means supports the often apocalyptic conversation on climate change.
  • The cost of inaction by the end of the century is equivalent to losing one year’s growth, or a moderate, one year recession.
  • The cost of inaction by the end of the century is equivalent to an annual loss of GDP growth on the order of 0.02%.
  • However, policy action as opposed to inaction, also has costs, and will still incur a significant part of the climate damage. Thus, with extremely unrealistically optimistic assumptions, it is possible that the total cost of climate action will be reduced slightly to 1.5% of GDP by the end of the century.
  • It is more likely that the cost of climate action will end up costing upwards of twice as much as climate inaction in this century – a reasonable estimate could be 2.8% of GDP towards the end of the century.
  • Climate action will harm mostly the poor. Examples from Germany and the UK are given.
  • To   tackle   global   warming,   it   is   much   more   important   to   dramatically  increase   funding   for   R&D   of   green   energy   to   make   future   green   energy  much   cheaper.   This   will   make   everyone   switch   when   green   is   cheap  enough,   instead   of   focusing   on   inefficient   subsidies   and   second best  policies   that   easily   end   up   costing   much   more.  

The part of Lomborg’s testimony that I found particularly compelling was the text related to energy poverty.  Excerpts:

The   first   realization   needs   to   be   that   the   current,   old fashioned   approach   to     tackling   global   warming   has   failed.   The   current   approach,   which   has   been   attempted   for   almost   20   years   since   the   1992   Earth   Summit   in   Rio,   is   to   agree   on     large   carbon   cuts   in   the   immediate   future.   Only   one   real   agreement,   the   Kyoto   Protocol,   has   resulted   from   20   years   of   attempts,   with   the   2009   Copenhagen   meeting   turning   into   a   spectacular   failure.  

The   Kyoto     approach     is     not     working   for   three   reasons.   First, cutting   CO2   is   costly.     Second, the   approach   won’t     solve     the     problem.   Even   if   everyone   had   implemented   Kyoto, temperatures   would   have   dropped   by   the   end   of   the   century   by   a   miniscule  0.004C     or     0.007F.     Third, green     energy     is     not     ready   to   take   over   from   fossil   fuels.

Current   global   warming   policies make   energy   much   more   costly.   This   negative   impact   is   often   much   larger, harms   the   world’s   poor   much   more,   and   is   much   more   immediate.  

Solar   and   wind   power   was   subsidized   by   $60   billion   in   2012,   despite   their     paltry   climate   benefit   of   $1.4   billion.   Essentially,   $58.6   billion   were   wasted.   Depending   on   political   viewpoint,   that   money   could   have   been   used   to   get   better   health   care,   more   teachers,   better   roads,   or   lower   taxes.   Moreover, forcing   everyone   to   buy   more   expensive,   less   reliable   energy   pushes   higher   costs   throughout   the   economy,   leaving   less   for   welfare.

The   burdens   from   these   climate   policies   fall   overwhelmingly   on   the   world’s   poor.   This   is   because   rich   people   can   easily   afford   to   pay   more   for   their   energy,   whereas   the   poor   will   be   struggling.   It   is   surprising   to   hear   that   well meaning   and   economically   comfortable   greens   often   suggest   that   gasoline   prices   should   be   doubled   or   electricity   exclusively   sourced    from   high cost   green   sources.  

Take   Pakistan   and   South   Africa.   With   too   little   generating   power   both   nations   experience   recurrent   blackouts   that   cost   jobs   and   wreck   the   economy.   Muhammad   Ashraf, who   worked   30   years   at   a   textile   plant   in   central   Pakistan,   was   laid   off   last   year   because   of   these   energy   shortages.   Being   too   old   to   get   another   job,   he   has   returned   to   his   village   to   eke   out   a   living   growing   wheat   on   a   tiny   plot   of   land.   Instead   of   $120   a   month,   he   now    makes   just   $25. Yet, the   funding   of   new   coal   fired   power   plants   in   both   Pakistan   and   South   Africa   has   been   widely   opposed   by   well meaning   Westerners   and   climate concerned   Western   governments.   They   instead   urge   these   countries   to   get   more   energy   from   renewables.  

But   this   is   cruelly   hypocritical.   The   rich   world   generates   just   0.76%   of   its   energy   from   solar   and   wind,   far   from   meeting  even   minimal   demand.   In   fact, Germany   will   build   ten   new    coal fired   power   plants   over   the   next   two   years   to   keep   its   own   lights   on.   

A   recent   analysis   from   the   Center   for   Global   Development   shows   that   $10   billion   invested   in   renewables   will   help   lift   20   million   people   in   Africa   out   of   poverty.   But   the   same   $10   billion   spent   on   gas  electrification   will   lift   90   million   people   out   of   poverty.    $10   billion   can   help   just   20   million   people.   Using   renewables,   we   deliberately   end   up   choosing   to   leave   more   than   70   million   people   –   more   than   3  out   of   4   –   in   darkness   and   poverty.  

The other thing that struck me in particular was the following text:

The   only   way   to    move   towards   a   long term   reduction   in   emissions   is   if   green   energy   becomes    much   cheaper.   If   green   energy   was   cheaper   than   fossil   fuels,   everyone   would   switch. This   requires   breakthroughs   in   the   current   green   technologies,   which   means   focusing   much   more   on   innovating   smarter,   cheaper,   more   effective   green   energy.  

The   metaphor   here   is   the   computer   in   the   1950s.   We   did   not   obtain   better   computers   by   mass producing   them   to   get   cheaper   vacuum   tubes.   We   did   not   provide   heavy   subsidies   so   that   every   Westerner   could   have   one   in   their   home   in   1960.   Nor   did   we   tax   alternatives   like   typewriters.   The   breakthroughs   were   achieved   by   a   dramatic   ramping   up   of   R&D,   leading   to   multiple   innovations,   which   enabled   companies   like   IBM   and   Apple   to   eventually   produce   computers   that   consumers   wanted   to   buy.  

This   is   what   the   US   has   done   with   fracking.   The   US   has   spent   about   $10bn   in   subsidies   over   the   past   three   decades   to   get   fracking   innovation,    which   has   opened   up   large   new   resources   of   previously   inaccessible   shale   gas.   Despite some   legitimate   concerns   about   safety, it   is   hard   to   overstate   the   overwhelming   benefits.   Fracking   has   caused   gas   prices   to   drop   dramatically   and   changed   the   US   electricity   generation   from   50%   coal   and   20%   gas   to   about   40%   coal   and   30%   gas.  

This   means   that   the   US   has   reduced   its   annual   CO₂ emissions   by   about   300Mt   CO₂   in   2012.   This   is   about   twice   the   total reduction   over   the   past   twenty   years   of   the   Kyoto   Protocol   from   the   rest   of   the   world,   including   the   European   Union.   At   the   same   time,   the   EU   climate   policy   will   cost   about   $280   billion   per   year,   whereas   the   US   fracking   is   estimated   to   increase US   GDP   by   $283   billion   per   year.    

 JC reflections

Read the entire testimony, well worth reading and pondering.

I take such economic projections with a grain of salt (where are the uncertainty estimates?),  but Lomborg’s point that the cure is likely worse than the disease is compelling.

Of particular concern is the impact of these energy policies on the poor. Lomborg makes this argument extremely effectively, and I can’t believe that more people don’t get this.  Last April I gave a climate change presentation to a group of Georgia Tech alumni.  Someone in the audience asked:  “What did you do for Earth day?”  I said Nothing.  I think turning out the lights sends the wrong message.  I want to see the lights go on in Africa.

We clearly need clean green energy, if not now then in the future.  Lomborg argues that our current strategies may be be slowing down the development of these technologies.

I have to say, after reading Lomborg’s testimony, current climate/energy policies have never made less sense.

7-cool-it

 

 

 

Health Departments Should Have Turbine Distress Hotlines!

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LOCAL HEALTH DEPARTMENTS SHOULD HAVE TURBINE DISTRESS HOTLINES‏

July 30, 2014 · by  ·

Carthage anti-wind power advocate appeals Canton wind project approval

Terry Karkos

A Carthage woman has filed an administrative appeal with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection of the eight-turbine wind project on Canton Mountain.

Alice McKay Barnett, an anti-wind power advocate, submitted seven documents of supplemental evidence on July 17 that mostly concerns turbine noise adversely affecting health.
 
The DEP approved the nearly $50 million, eight-turbine Canton Mountain wind project in May. Canton Mountain Wind LLC is owned by Patriots Renewables LLC of Quincy, Mass.
 
The Canton project is part of a larger plan to include similar wind projects in the adjacent towns of Dixfield and Carthage. Construction has already started on the Carthage project — Saddleback Ridge. It is a 34.2 megawatt, 12-turbine wind project that’s expected to be completed in 2015.
 
The Dixfield project, Timberwinds, is still in the early stage of development, according to Patriots Renewables’ website. The proposed project would consist of six to 12 turbines sited on Colonel Holman Ridge in Dixfield.
 
In her petition for review of final agency action against the DEP and Canton Mountain Wind LLC, Barnett writes that she objects to a ruling that the wind developer establish a toll-free complaint hotline designated to allow concerned citizens to call in noise-related complaints 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Barnett said she believes a complaint hotline like that should be in the hands of health officials instead of a wind developer. She cited Spruce Mountain Wind, Patriots Renewables’ 20 megawatt, 10-turbine wind project located in Woodstock.
 
She said that developer “is not responsible to collect data of complaints.” Barnett then cites and includes several examples of that, such as complaints by residents adversely impacted by SMW turbine noise and the developer’s control of noise by purchasing noise easements or making sound agreements with property owners.
 
“I request local health officials maintain a hotline (at the expense of the developer) as they know the local area and the citizens who reside in the impacted zone of industrial wind turbines,” Barnett stated in her petition.”Local health officials could respond directly to complaints on hotline, and then ask county and state for help. Public health nurses continually work to improve the health of individuals, populations, cultures and communities. A public health nurse can enforce laws and regulation,” she stated.
 
Barnett also said the Maine Department of Environmental Health and the Center for Disease Control offered no help. She said wind turbine noise is a health issue and that the DEP and Patriots Renewables are not health experts.
She also asked to strike the word “expert” from a page in the Canton Mountain Wind permit, stating the firms listed are paid consultants not experts per the order of the Bower’s Mountain uphold of denial of the Champlain Wind permit on June 5.
 
Additionally, she named five people living in East Dixfield, Jay and Canton and within two miles of the Canton Mountain Wind turbines who have asked that no harm be done to their property.
 
She defined “harm” to include light pollution from turbine blade flicker and red flashing lights, audible wind turbulence noise levels, air turbulence, sound wave emissions (included but not limited to infrasound) disturbance or emanations of any kind of nature that are created in the ordinary course of operations of the Canton wind facility.
 
“They do not want diminished property value,” Barnett said.
 
Cynthia S. Bertocci, executive analyst with the Board of Environmental Protection, replied to Barnett’s appeal in a letter dated July 22.
Bertocci told Barnett that her timely appeal contains proposed supplemental evidence that will require a ruling from the board chairman, Robert A. Foley of Wells.
 
Following Foley’s ruling on the proposed supplemental evidence,  the board will set a deadline for the filing of comments on the merits of the appeal and notify Barnet of the deadline.
Bertocci said information in Barnett’s appeal doesn’t appear in the DEP’s licensing record.
Per department rule, a respondent — defined as the licensee or anyone who submitted written comment on the application — can submit written comment on the admissibility of Barnett’s proposed supplemental evidence.
They can also offer proposed supplemental evidence in response to Barnett’s evidence and issues raised on appeal, Bertocci said. The respondent’s submission is due within 30 days of the date of the board’s written determination as to which of the appellant’s exhibits constitute proposed supplemental evidence.
Bertocci said the board may allow the record to be supplemented on appeal when it finds that the evidence offered is relevant and material and that:
* The person seeking to supplement the record has shown due diligence in bringing the evidence to the department at the earliest possible time.
* The evidence is newly discovered and by due diligence, could not have been discovered in time to be presented earlier in the licensing process.
Bertocci said the deadline for the licensee and anyone who submitted written comment on the application to comment on the admissibility of Barnett’s proposed supplemental evidence, is by 5 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 21.
 
After Foley rules on the admissibility of Barnett’s evidence, the board will set the deadline to respond to the merits of her appeal.

Climate Scientists Less Accurate than the Local Weatherman! LOL!

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Climate Science Wrong For 120 Years

JUL 30

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Climate Science predicted in 1895 a new ice age, by 1902 the glaciers were melting and by 1912 the ice age was back.

Predicting the end of the world is part of the human condition, people have always been convinced Doomsday was just around the corner. From the soothsayers of Roman times casting their runes and reading animal entrails predicting global apocalypse to the soothsayersclimate scientists soothsayers of the 21st Century casting their digital runes and predicting global apocalypse.

Despite the passage of 20 Centuries the modern day rune casters are no more accurate than their distant ancestors were, the expensive and religiously revered “Computer Models” have yet to predict any event that has actually happened, yet their erroneous results still trump observed empirical evidence.

The Climate Change catastrophe is not a new phenomenon, it first appeared as we know it today in the closing years of the 19th Century:

1895 – Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again –New York Times, February 1895

By 1902 the Los Angeles Times was reporting that the glaciers were disappearing, their final annihilation in just a few years was a matter of scientific fact.

Sound familiar?

It should, the 21st Century version of disappearing glaciers is known as Glaciergate.

However 10 years down the road and the Climate Scientists were unsure if the planet was warming or cooling:

1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912

1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune

1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post

1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924

1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?

1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World

Just a year later and the story changed again:

1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933

1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”

For the next 40 years warming alarmism held sway until 1970 when we were all going to freeze to death again:

1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post

Less than 20 years later and we were all going to fry again:

1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context

1989 -“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989

1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth

The ultimate straw man argument, even if the problem is non existent then dealing with a non existent problem is the right thing to do.

One can only wonder what sort of world Senator Wirth inhabits, then you read his bio and the words Democrat and UN leap out at you, and there is your answer.

It would appear that climate science is cyclic much like the weather and ultimately the climate,  it struggles to predict with any degree of accuracy or precision.

More Proof, that “Climate Scam” was Never Intended to Improve Our Environment.

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Over the Transom: Climate Scientologists destroy nature in order to save the environment.

 

I recall reading a piece some time ago by an avid environmentalist who made a point lost on his fellow environmentalists: So-called “alternative” energy can have an effect on the environment even worse than conventional energy.

This article about a plan to destroy a forest in Germany makes that point better than he ever could. It seems that a developer plans to erect 60 giant wind turbines in an untouched forest that is the pride of the region of Palitinate.

That’s too much for the locals:

“According to Die Welt, hungry wind park developers with deep pockets plan to install 60 wind turbines, each 209 meters (700 feet) tall in the area. Unsurprisingly this looming large-scale green industrialization of this particularly idyllic landscape has become too much to take, even for the most avid climate activist groups. Die Welt writes that for the first time all ten local environmental groups have closed ranks against the project, says Bernd Wallner of the Pfälzerwald-Verein (Palantinate Association).”

mercer solar.JPGAn unsightly solar array occupies what had been acres and acres of farm and forest on the Mercer County College campusPhoto by Paul Mulshine 

These people are learning the less so many New Jerseyans have already learned: Wind and solar projects can be much more irritating and ugly than any other source of power.

I wrote here about how some beautiful farm fields and tree stands at Mercer County College were bulldozed for an unsightly solar array that stretches for acres.

And then there was that horribly misguided idea of putting a wind turbine right in the middle of the small town of Ocean Gate. The houses in that Shore community are on small lots, which means many are withing hearing range. It sounds like a dryer with some loose change rattling around within.

Meanwhile the power produced by these plants can cost up to 400 times as much as conventional power according to this article. That’s because conventional gas and coal plants have to be online to make up for the unpredictable surges in wind and solar power.

I have long argued that belief in the alarmist view of anthropogenic global warming is more of a religion than a science. The true believers are essentially puritans who feel guilty about having ample electricity at their disposal. So they dream up ways of making it more expensive and less accessible.

Good for them, but if they really believed global warming was such a threat then they would be pushing the only technology that is capable of generating huge amounts of power with no CO-2 emissions. That’s nuclear power. The Germans plan to phase it out.

But somehow I suspect they won’t follow through on those plans. At a certain point, an industrial country needs power. And Germans already pay twice as much for it as we do. I don’t think they’re going to let their economy destroyed because of the work of a bunch of climate “scientists.”

I put the word in quotes because the real experts in this field are not the climatologists. By the very nature of their studies, climatologist have a vested interest in further alarmism about global warming. The more alarmism, the more money gets spent on their studies.

But the true experts are the physicists. Not surprisingly, the most prominent among them like to point out that this is a field that requires much more study before any definitive conclusions can be arrived at. The most prominent such physicist is Freeman Dyson
of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Dyson, who may be the smartest man on the planet, has told me in some detail why he is a climate-change skeptic.

Despite the complicated nature of the problem, Dyson can talk to regular people about it. That’s because he is a writer of many books that explain scientific concepts to laymen.

So was Richard P. Feynman. Feynman, who worked on the atom bomb back in World War II, was the author of a number of books including “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman.”

The book is a compendium of anecdotes by Feynman about his various adventures working on the bomb, learning how to crack safes, and deducing the science of picking up women in bars.

 

No one with a sense of humor could be offended in the least by any of it. But the world of science has becomes so politically correct these days that a writer was canned from a leading science publication for being insufficiently offended by the book.

This Washington Post piece explains how blogger Ashutosh Jogalekar got the boot:

Commenting on recent biographies of Feynman, Jogalekar noted the physicist’s “casual sexism,” including his affairs with two married women, his humiliation of a female student and his delight in documenting his strategies for picking up women in bars. But while expressing disappointment in Feynman’s behavior, Jogalekar essentially dismissed it as a byproduct of the “male-dominated American society in the giddy postwar years.”

Within a day of the column’s appearance, Scientific American pulled it from its site, with another note from Brainard: “The text of this post has been removed because it did not meet Scientific American’s quality standards.”

It turns out that the Scientific American people are also trying to bowdlerize writers for expressing frank opinions on the connection between genetics and intelligence. That should tell you all you need to know about why global-warming alarmism remains ascendant in the media: To these p.c. types, propaganda trumps science every time.

And by the way, no one is actually questioning the science behind Feynman’s theories on how he could best pick up women. Note this one outraged writer’s piece on the controversy.

“Basically, Feynman was convinced that buying women things and expecting sex as payment was respecting them. In order to do anything different, he had to disrespect them and think of them as horrible demons.”

No, what Feynman was doing was running an experiment in how to pick up women. He decided they don’t fall for guys who chase them too much.

In the book, he describes how a bartender in New Mexico taught him that lesson and how it worked out in practice. He then concludes that “I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.”

Now that, boys and girls, is the scientific mind at work. It would have been fascinating to see how Feynman treated all the hype over global warming. Unfortunately he died in 1988.