Saturday 10 August 2013

A German physicist takes on the global warming establishment

German physicist, professor Horst-Joachim Lüdecke is not afraid of taking on the global warming establishment in Germany and elsewhere. Below are a few excerpts of a recent interview (in German):

For decades Germans were misinformed and successfully "brought up" in an eco-ideological way. This was possible, because the green movement has conquered the editorial staffs of the leading German media, like e.g. public service television, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, die ZEIT, and others. In addition, eco-ideologists also have taken over the important academic key positions. Professor Hans-Joachim Schnellhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research (PIK) and the Chancellor's climate adviser, is one good example. He is propagating a "great transformation" and the removal of democratic rules in order to achieve this goal. --

Climate protection has nothing to do with genuine nature conservation (as e.g. protection of rain forests and fish populations in the oceans). The prescribed means for reducing CO2 are effectless and meaningless . --

The IPCC, a UN organization positioned against objective and impartial climate science, is an institution consisting of eco-ideologists connected with related NGOs. Most IPCC documents are not written by experts, but by activists. --

Wind turbines and solar cells have no effect on the climate or the CO2 balance of a country. However, the energy transition (Energiewende) is causing a huge unavoidable rise in electricity prices - not at all a price reduction!

Millions of birds and bats will die as a result of Obama's global warming plan (which will have no real effect on global temperatures)

The sad truth about Barack Obama's global warming plan:

A newly published peer-reviewed study reports U.S. wind turbines kill 1.4 million birds and bats every year, even while producing just 3 percent of U.S. electricity. the numbers in the study from Wildlife Society Bulletin reveal President Obama’s global warming plan will kill hundreds of millions of birds and bats while doing little if anything to reduce global temperatures.

Even if no new wind turbines are ever built, turbine blades will slice 14 million birds and bats to death in midflight during the next decade. However, global warming alarmists say we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50 or even 80 percent. President Obama’s recently announced assault on climate change appears likely to seek such numbers. Given that most global warming alarmists also vigorously oppose hydropower, natural gas power, and nuclear power, reducing emissions by 50 to 80 percent would require increasing the number of wind turbines roughly 25-fold. That means killing 350 million birds and bats in the United States every decade.

Read the entire article here

Obama and Putin - two "kids" as world leaders

Yesterday Barack Obama was quick to downplay his decision to cancel a meeting with the corrupt Russian dictator Vladimir Putin:

At a White House news conference on Friday, Obama insisted that he does not have bad personal relations with Putin. The two men had a testy meeting in June in Northern Ireland and from the photos of them at the time, it looked as if they would both rather have been somewhere else.
"I know the press likes to focus on body language, and he's got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom. But the truth is that when we're in conversations together, oftentimes it's very productive," Obama said

And Obama is the clueless kid ordered to sit in the front row by the teacher.

Friday 9 August 2013

Jürgen Habermas - a naive dilettante, with regard to Europe

German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas is said to be "one of the world's leading intellectuals". However, when it comes to the current euro crisis and the EU in general, he is nothing but a naive dilettante:

It's worth repeating again and again: The suboptimal conditions under which the European Monetary Union operates today are the result of a design flaw, namely that the political union was never completed. That's why pushing the problems onto the shoulders of the crisis-ridden countries with credit financing isn't the answer. The imposition of austerity policies cannot correct the existing economic imbalances in the euro zone. An assimilation of the different levels in productivity in the mid-term could only be expected from a joint, or at least closely coordinated, fiscal, economic and social policy. And if we then, in the course of countervailing policies, don't wish to completely turn into a technocracy, we must ask the public what they think about a democratic core Europe. Wolfgang Schäuble knows this. He says as much in SPIEGEL interviews, which, however, have no consequences for his political behavior.
European policy is in a trap that the political sociologist Claus Offe has sharply illuminated: If we do not want to give up the monetary union, an institutional reform, which takes time, is both necessary and unpopular. This is why politicians who hope to be re-elected are kicking the can down the road. The German government, in particular, is in a double bind, because it has already assumed pan-European responsibility through its actions. It is also the only government that can take a promising initiative for a step forward -- and should pursue France's support for such a process. It isn't a trifling project, after all, but one into which Europe's most prominent politicians have invested their best efforts for more than half a Century.

Read the entire article here

Of course Habermas is right about the design flaw with regard the euro. However, he should know that neither the Germans, nor the peoples of the other EU countries will accept a federal European state. Habermas accuses Angela Merkel of "soporific bumbling", but in reality he is himself the bumbler. Instead of stating clearly that he wants Germans (and others) to give up their national sovereignty, Habermas mumbles about "a democratic core Europé", "institutional reform" and "pan-European responsibility". Not very convincing!

David Cameron: Britain would be "making big mistake" if it did not seriously consider fracking

The European greenies, aided by Russia's Gazprom, are making huge efforts to prevent Europe from joining the shale gas revolution. On this issue, the UK Prime Minister David Cameron is fortunately on the right side:

Britain would be “making a big mistake” if it did not seriously consider fracking and the prospect of cheaper gas prices, the Prime Minister has warned.

David Cameron said the country is “missing out big time at the moment” as he compared the number of shale gas wells dug in the European Union compared with the United States. But he cautioned that safety needs to be assured and that “very clear” environmental procedures would have to be met before companies were given the go-ahead to start fracking.
The economy needs rebalancing but a key part of that is the need to have affordable energy, he added. “I think we would be making a big mistake as a nation if we did not think hard about how to encourage fracking and cheaper prices right here in the UK,” he said at a Q&A session at Crown Paints in Darwen, Lancashire.
“If you look what’s happening in America with the advent of shale gas and fracking, their energy costs in business and their gas prices are half the level of ours. We are seeing businesses that have previously gone off to Mexico and elsewhere come back to the United States.

Thursday 8 August 2013

British journalist predicts that the newly born Prince George will become a "radical ecowarrior"

It appears that Britain's new royal grandpa, Prince Charles, is already making preparations for his first grandchild, Prince George:

"more recently, he’s started expressing his long-standing concerns about climate change and environmental degradation in a new, grandpa-centric fashion. “I don’t want to be confronted by my future grandchild and (have) them say: ‘Why didn’t you do something?’ It makes it even more obvious to try and make sure we leave them something that isn’t a total poisoned chalice.”

Of course Prince Charles is ably aided by many of his fellow warmists, one of whom, the Guardian's Nafeez Ahmed, is forecasting that Prince George is destined to become a "radical ecowarrior":

Fast forward to Year 2050, and assuming Prince George takes after his environmentalist grandfather, he'll be grappling with the reality of an increasingly uninhabitable planet for over half of the global population. Based on the most conservative predictions for business as usual - even if we meet all our emissions reduction pledges - we are heading for about 3 degree Celsius rise in global average temperatures by that time. Let's not even bother thinking about the impact of amplifying feedbacks that most climate models ignore. ---

The higher costs of resource extraction not just for fossil fuels, but also for everything else, will act as an intensifying drag on the economy. Simultaneously, the devastating impacts of routine climate catastrophes in the form of extreme weather, heat stress, proliferation of diseases, and so on, will trigger ongoing costs slashing into world GDP to the tune of 3.2% annually at least.
This dual combination of deepening energy and environmental costs will basically kill growth.
The geopolitical implications of all this are incalculable, but it won't be good. Major oil exporters in the Middle East and North Africa will be collapsing as their oil revenues plummet and they fail to provide for the water and food needs of their populations - processes already at way in countries like Egypt and Syria. China and India will be grappling with domestic uprisings, too, as their unsustainable debt-saddled demographic dividends explode into nightmares.

The UK, following the US lead, may find itself increasingly embroiled in long, unpopular and costly military expeditions responding to myriad climate emergencies while simultaneously attempting to secure fast-diminishing resources. As their welfare systems collapse under the strain of dwindling GDP, as governments resort to knee-jerk police-state measures to quell domestic anger, we could see social polarisation and the resurgence of extremist nationalism on a scale that would make Greece's Golden Dawn look like a holiday agency. Government and corporate-backed land grabbing will accelerate as states and investors seek to maximise strained profits amidst rocketing land and commodity prices, displacing millions of poor and fueling local uprisings.

In short, looking through the lens of business as usual, Prince George is part of a generation of children who, if they survive to 2050, will confront a brave new world that is crowded, underfed, thirsty, poor, unemployed and fighting for survival. He of course would be shielded from much of these impacts - but if he is anything like his grandfather, it will haunt him. If that's not enough to turn a Prince into a radical ecowarrior, I don't what else would.

Still, one would hope that the Prince of Wales would rather heed the advice offered by a Welsh granny:

 "During his annual summer tour of Wales, he even stopped in at a pub and asked a group of local grandmothers for their best advice. “Spoil them and enjoy it,” 74-year-old Eileen Joseph counselled."



Obama as a foreign policy leader - more and more like Jimmy Carter

US President Barack Obama's decision to cancel a meeting ewith Russian dictator Vladimir Putin was the right one. However, that does not solve the problem of Obama's weakness as a foreign policy leader.

Finally, people have begun to realize that Obama is more and more looking like Jimmy Carter. This is how the German Daily Die Welt puts it:

"Putin believes that Obama -- who gave up plans for a missile defense program in Poland and the Czech Republic when he didn't need to -- is weak. This is one of the reasons why he offered Snowden asylum. Obama had no choice but to express disappointment and to cancel his visit to Moscow. A gesture of Carter-esque helplessness on the heels of a humiliation of Carter-esque proportions. It will be seen in Tehran the same way is it is seen in Moscow, which does not bode well for the looming conflict over Iran's nuclear policy."
"One thing is clear: Criticism of Barack Obama's Carter-esque foreign policy is growing, and rightly so."

Wednesday 7 August 2013

Research scientist: "unlikely that we will see a large scale market driven displacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy in the first half of this century"


The renewable energy lobby likes to point out how wind and solar power soon will be able to compete with traditional fossil fuel based energy production. Ideologically this is of course very attractive. "Who would not want clean and ´free´energy for everyone forever?", as research scientist Schalk Cloete put it in his excellent recent article "The Renewable Energy Reality Check".

Now Cloete has written another article in which he shows that it is "unlikely (read impossible, NNoN) that we will see a large scale market driven displacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy in the first half of this century."

So, what does renewable energy have to accomplish before it can compete with fossil fuels in an open market? Well, in short, we will have to overcome the diffuse and intermittent nature of renewable energy more efficiently than we can overcome the declining reserve qualities and unrefinhoed nature of fossil fuels.
In other words, renewables need to overcome the following two challenges in order to displace fossil fuels in a fair market:
  1. Solar panels and wind turbines need to become cheaper than raw fossil fuels. This is the challenge posed by the diffuse nature of renewables.
  2. Storage solutions need to become cheaper than fossil fuel refineries (e.g. power plants). This is the challenge posed by the intermittent nature of renewables.--
Renewable energy advocates often point to the total energy fluxes of the Earth (below) and proclaim that renewable energy resources are essentially boundless. Yes, it is true: we are surrounded by incredible amounts of diffuse renewable energy (e.g. solar radiation and wind). Unfortunately, however, this energy is useless to us unless it is concentrated into forms such as electricity or fuels.

The reason behind this is called the second law of thermodynamics which states that energy must flow from a concentrated form to a more diffuse form in order to do work. Our entire society was built on the work performed through transforming concentrated fossil energy to diffuse heat and, in order to compete, renewable energy technologies also need to deliver such concentrated energy.--


In order for intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar PV to effectively compete with fossil fuels like coal, both the price of installed solar panels and the price of battery storage will need to reduce by a full order of magnitude. In addition, optimistic long-term projections state that both solar panels and battery storage will reach technological maturity at roughly triple the cost of their fossil fuel counterparts.
Does this mean that it is fundamentally impossible for renewable energy to trump fossil fuels? Well, I would stop short of saying that, but, from this analysis, it appears unlikely that we will see a large scale market driven displacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy in the first half of this century.

Sunday 4 August 2013

The insanity of David Cameron's wind energy policy unveiled

The Telegraph's columnist Christopher Booker - with the assistance of blogger Richard North - unveils the insanity of the UK government's wind energy policy:

Occasionally, one comes across a story so mind-blowingly unexpected and out-of-left-field that it seems hard for readers to take on board that it is true. Such is the story I first reported here last month, under the heading, “Our lights will stay on, but it’ll cost us a fortune”, about the scheme being devised by the National Grid to solve what has long been the most intractable problem created by the Government’s plan to see the best part of £110 billion spent in seven years on building tens of thousands more wind turbines – namely, how to keep our national grid “balanced” when it has to cope with all those unpredictably wild fluctuations in the speed of the wind.

The answer National Grid has come up with, only made possible by the latest computer technology and “cloud software”, is to hook up thousands of diesel generators, remotely controlled by the grid, to provide almost instantly available back-up for when the wind drops. As we can see from recent reports, such as the National Grid’s draft consultation on “Demand Side Balancing Reserve and Supplemental Balancing Reserve”, this is now taking off into the weirdest and most ambitious scheme yet called into being by our politicians’ obsession with wind turbines. As uncovered by the tireless research of my colleague, Richard North, on his EU Referendum blog, owners of diesel generators are being incentivised with offers of astronomic fees to make them available to the grid – subsidies equivalent to up to 12 times the going rate for conventional electricity, and even, on very rare occasions, up to £15,000 per megawatt hour (MWh), or 300 times the normal rate of £50 per MWh.

Read the entire article here, and Richard North's comments here.

Australia´s warmist PM Rudd about to send thousands of refugees to sinking Nauru

"Nauru is just one of several ‘sinking nations’ that may very well vanish beneath the ocean if effective measures for restoring and preserving valuable coastline are not implemented. "
Wenger

"Climate Change is the biggest Moral Challenge of our lifetime"
Kevin Rudd

What a devious and cruel man Australia´s socialist PM Kevin Rudd must be. This man, who has said  that "climate change is the biggest moral challenge of our lifetime", has now decided to send thousands of refugees to the tiny island state of Nauru, which (according to Rudd´s global warming alarmist friends) is about to sink into the Pacific ocean:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, facing an imminent election, enlisted the help of the Pacific Island nation of Nauru in his hardline policy of denying asylum seekers arriving by boat the right to settle in Australia.
Rudd was reinstated in his job just over a month ago and has improved his Labour Party's previously dismal standing in opinion polls ahead of an election now due within weeks. His get-tough policy on asylum seekers is seen as a vote winner in poorer districts where immigrant numbers are high.
Rudd and the President of Nauru, Baron Waqa, signed a memorandum of understanding providing for asylum seekers arriving by boat to be sent to Nauru where they can opt for resettlement after their claims for refugee status are processed. --
Saturday's agreement denies genuine refugees arriving by boat the option of being resettled in Australia. Australia, in turn, will provide Nauru with A$29.9 million ($26.6 million) in aid.

Euroscepticism on the rise - Will the Dutch again show the way for Europe?

"Dutch Euroscepticism is reaching unheard-of heights: a Gallup survey in early June found voters split evenly, 39% each, on whether to exit the EU entirely. Most recent political polls put the Freedom Party in a close scrum for the second-largest share of the vote, and one poll has it in the lead. The other strongly Eurosceptic party, the far-left Socialists, is doing nearly as well."
The Financial Times


The Dutch used to be the champions of European integration. Now it appears that they will again show the way for Europe:

Those days are gone, and in July Geert Wilders, a far-right politician known for calling on the Netherlands to ban the Koran and exit the euro, wrote them a piquant epitaph. Mr Wilders announced he would hold talks with right-wing parties in other countries about forming an anti-Europe bloc in the European Parliament elections this autumn. He has since spoken with Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, a party similar to Mr Wilders’s Freedom Party in many ways, and with the Lega Nord in Italy. Having shattered the multi-cultural Netherlands, which once brokered the integration of Europe, Mr Wilders is now proposing to undertake Europe’s dismantling.

Read the entire article here

Simon Hix, European politics professor at the London School of Economics, recently presented a report which confirms that things are looking good from an eurocritical point of view:

“My belief is that we will see a rise in eurosceptic votes,” Hix said, referring to strong surges by anti-European groups and poor performance of socialists in national opinion polls.

“Coalitions that we may think of as stable now may be very different with a different make-up of the Parliament in the future. If more anti-European than pro-European forces are in the Parliament, we could see a strong effect.”

This might pose problems for the other major EU institutions. “It is difficult to see how the European Commission and the Council are going to respond to what might a wave of euroscepticism,” he said.

The Germans have been able to create an artificial lull in the continuing euro crisis, but one thing is certain - the crisis will return with a vengeance after the September 22 elections in Germany. This will of course lead to increasing support for eurocritical forces all over the European Union.