A Highly Cautionary Tale for the United States Two nights ago there was no power on the Iberian Peninsula. Earlier in the day, reports say that power failed in parts of France. Why? Renewables. What those of us who have warning about the danger of wind (especially) and solar has come to pass.  Wind and solar are useful at small scales for specific projects. For example, a solar panel connected to a battery (for night and when it is cloudy) makes all the sense in the world for a flashing red sign on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Utility scale wind and solar -- terrible idea.  From Javier Blas: Remember: more "renewables" don't improve the grid, they destabilize it further. Electric rates in  United States areas with high amounts of renewable energy are skyrocketing. This is something to discuss with your politicians and when your local utility requests rate increases. 

I received an email from a friend in Ft. Worth Sunday pertaining to his elderly parents (80's) and the fact they had been contacted by a company wanting to put solar panels on their roof. He wanted to know if I knew anything about this since I live nearby.  Turns out, this is a common scam -- with the elderly as a target. See  here  , among others. Please inform your elderly relatives about this to make sure they do not fall victim.  LinkedIn Turns out this company, Sunnova, has received considerable support from the Biden Administration and is now the subject of a congressional investigation . The field of 'green' energy seems to be filled with graft.  Again, please  inform your elderly parents and do not let them sign anything until it is has thoroughly vetted. 

Some items from the past week.  ' Earlier this week, a Georgia politician told me that one of the problems with nuclear is that the plants take a long time to construct (of course they do, we want them safe). Up to a point, that is true. What is her "solution"? Wind. Never mind that wind is highly unreliable and also expensive. Want proof? From Tuesday afternoon: The USA already has too much wind energy. Its problems have been known for far longer than it takes to build a nuke (a piece from this blog from 2010). If politicians had not paid attention to the seductionary messages from the wind lobby, we would have solved the problem as the headline below (from Forbes ) indicates.  Below is a story, also from Tuesday, which highlights rapidly growing issues with wind energy. In spite of massive  subsidies for wind energy, new projects are falling apart from coast-to-coast. We desperately need more baseline (reliable) energy. It is best done by nuclear because it is carbon-...

Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. presents some very good news about future temperatures .  For a complete assessment as to where we stand with regard to the climate and climate science, Dr. Judith Curry has a great summary here .  We've already established that wind energy is a joke (unreliable and expensive). Now, we know that solar fits those descriptions. That may not seem like good news but it is. Whenever we gain knowledge, we can make better decisions. Past time to stop utility level installations of wind and solar. 

I don't know if the intelligence community in Washington has picked up on something, or is just extrapolating from the recent Colonial Pipeline terrorist shutdown , but the flurry of articles on the subject of electrical system terrorism continue .  Plus, there is nothing we can do to stop a solar storm from attacking earth.  It is almost impossible to overstate the catastrophe -- far worse than the COVID shortages or last week's gasoline shortages -- that would exist if our electricity was shut off in a large geographic area for any significant amount of time. Possible examples: Stores quickly run out of goods -- including grocery and drug stores Water supplies, at best, are limited.  Hospital generators run out of fuel.  Cell towers and telephone systems fail a few days into the crisis.   That is why I urge my readers to stock up on essentials in a way that could sustain them for at least  two weeks. We have a longer-duration supply in our home. We rotat...

Saturday, I posted a piece titled " Well, This is Terrifying... " on the extreme danger posted by solar storms to America (especially) and the world.  Meteorologist Roger Edwards brought the article, Racing the Sun to Protect America  to my attention. Posted Friday, it outlines the danger to GPS and to America should a strong solar storm occur.  If you think the COVID shortages of 2020 or the gas shortages of last week were bad, the problems would be far, far worse if a solar storm (CME) should occur.  With a Carrington intensity solar storm there is a chance your car will be dead (literally) along with many appliances that contain chips or are connected to commercial power. This is especially true in more northern locations.  As the article goes on to say,  Government leaders have known about this near-existential risk to America for years. They have promised to to act [since 2004]  but haven't.  This is a far greater risk than global w...

We knew that once the coronavirus crisis began to ease, Big Climate would try to get back on the front page. No surprise there. Still, I have to give Big Climate and their expensive public relations agencies credit for moxie for trying to twist wonderful news for humanity into something bad. After twenty years of, preposterously, asserting that changes in the sun's energy don't matter to earth's climate, even the climate alarmists have to now concede something is very wrong with the sun. As this blog and numerous other publications have pointed out, our sun is on vacation: record low numbers of sunspots which many scientists believe is morphing into a Grand Solar Minimum (GSL). In past centuries, GSL's have been associated with extreme cold and even the "Little Ice Age." What happened during the last Little Ice Age? According to Wikipedia, Historians have argued that cultural responses to the consequences of the Little Ice Age in Europe consisted of...

Let's see: Solar + Wind = Less Energy at Higher Cost. At least with fires, we can cook our dinners. Oh, wait, the fires give off CO2 (the dreaded "CO2 pollution," according to Al Gore). The full story is here . CNBC is also covering it, here . Solar can be extremely valuable in remote areas and for specialized uses. Some day, it may be valuable for wider use if a large scale, economical storage system is developed along with better solar panels. But, when Big Climate tells us wind and solar can replace fossil fuels, they are engaged in dangerous , magical thinking. ADDITION: Seconds after posting the above, the following came across my Twitter feed. These are two of Mike's series of tweets. Europe went down the primrose path of 'green' energy earlier and more aggressively than the United States and now there is a huge backlash due to price increases and even blackouts due to renewables destabilizing the grid.

(reposting from February) Addition: Kathleen adds, "Whatever you do don't drive through Dickinson County, Kansas, on your way to the eclipse. I hear they are cracking down on eclipse chasers." Original posting: The rarest type of solar eclipse is going to occur in the U.S. in May. It occurs on Sunday, May 20. The path of the eclipse and timing are illustrated below: click to enlarge An annular eclipse is just like a total eclipse except it occurs when the moon is farther away from earth than usual. So, instead of a completely dark sun, you get a tiny yellow circle around the dark moon (see below). We had a full annular eclipse visible from Wichita in 1994. The sky turned a very dark blue and the stars came out. The temperature dropped noticeably. You will have to have welder's glass or a similar suitable viewing device. I'm presenting this now, so if you'd like to see this rare event, you can make plans to go to the Southwest. Climatological...

Is the first decade+ of the 21st century the warmest in the past 100 years (as per Peter Gleick’s argument)?  Yes, but the very small positive trend is not consistent with the expectation of 0.2C/decade provided by the IPCC AR4.  In terms of anticipating temperature change in the coming decades, the AGW dominated prediction of 0.2C/decade does not seem like a good bet, particularly with the prospect of reduced solar radiation.                              ---- Dr. Judith Curry, Climate Scientist WattsUpWithThat has run two recent articles pertaining to the threat of global cooling. Based on my research, significant cooling would be far worse for humanity than warming. The first article, by Dr. Nicola Scafetta , discusses the linking of solar-lunar cycles to earth's temperature. [caption id="attachment_7161" align="alignnone" width="622" caption="IPCC's 2007 forecast. The upper and lower bound of the of the green is the "95% confidence...

If you read a single story about 'global warming' (or lack thereof) this month, please read this one . Some highlights: He [Dr. Nicola Scarfetta] believes that as the Met Office model attaches much greater significance to CO2 than to the sun, it was bound to conclude that there would not be cooling. ‘The real issue is whether the model itself is accurate,’ Dr Scafetta said. Meanwhile, one of America’s most eminent climate experts, Professor Judith Curry of the  Georgia Institute of Technology, said she found the Met Office’s confident prediction of a ‘negligible’ impact difficult to understand. ‘The responsible thing to do would be to accept the fact that the models may have severe shortcomings when it comes to the influence of the sun,’ said Professor Curry. As for the warming pause, she said that many scientists ‘are not surprised’. She argued it is becoming evident that factors other than CO2 play an important role in rising or falling warmth, such as the 60-year water ...

From the Wall Street Journal   online: Delta Air Lines  Inc. said Tuesday that it was rerouting some transpolar flights between Asia and the U.S. to avoid the impact of the largest solar storm in almost a decade. The Atlanta-based carrier said some flights to Detroit from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Seoul took a more southerly routing on overnight flights, though a spokesman said planes flew faster to keep schedules intact. Tuesday departures from the U.S. were expected to follow similar routes. The solar storm has been the topic of a great deal of interest here at the AMS meeting (see below).

headline from The Watchers.com The head of Russia's Sun Sector Research, Dr. Habibullo I. Addussamatov, at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences believes that -- due to the very low level of solar activity the past few years -- we are going to begin 100 years of cooling. The English version of his paper is here . It is only moderately technical, so please feel free to read it for yourself. I've blogged on this topic before, as recently as June, 2011. The number of scientists who believe the problem is cooling is steadily growing. Significant cooling would be far worse for humanity than warming  -- I doubt any reasonable scientist would disagree with that statement. The science is far  from settled!

From meteorologist Paul Hudson at the BBC : For as long as I have been a meteorologist, the mere suggestion that solar activity could influence climate patterns has been greeted with near derision. Quite why this has been the case is difficult to fathom. But it's been clear for a long time that there must be a link of some kind, ever since decades ago Professor Lamb discovered an empirical relationship between low solar activity and higher pressure across higher latitudes such as Greenland. Perhaps the art of weather forecasting has become so dominated by supercomputers, and climate research so dominated by the impact of man on global climate, that thoughts of how natural processes, such as solar variation, could influence our climate have been largely overlooked, until very recently. We have come full circle -- that what I was taught about climate at the University of Oklahoma in the early 1970's is now thought of as a new revelation.  Here are some of the headlines out of ...

No kidding... Due to solar effects. Details at WattsUpWithThat . This blog has been talking about the potential for global cooling due to solar effects since its very beginning. Look here and here .

Now that we have begun a new decade since the attacks of 9/11, I believe it is time to take a fresh look at the TSA and airport security. As a person who has spent an entire career developing techniques to save lives and manage risks, the expenditure of $57,000,000,000 on airport security is at best excessive and at worst largely a waste. What do I mean as "excessive"? Given that cockpit doors are locked and that passengers would fight back against any attempt to hijack a plane, spending that amount of money -- given the far more serious threats we are hardly addressing -- is nonsensical. We just saw 46 deaths and (preliminary estimate) $15,000,000,000 in damage due to weak Hurricane Irene. Just imagine what a category 4 hurricane (which occurred in 1938) could do to the Northeast given today's population!  Want $10/gallon gasoline? Just put a cat 3 or greater hurricane into the Houston Ship Channel. We have put too many fuel production eggs in that basket. These ...

...with at least seven days of water and food, batteries, flashlight, fire extinguisher, essential medicines, etc. I try never to let my gas tank get too close to empty. Why do I bring this up? NOAA is again warning of the danger of a major solar storm which is very similar to the threat posed by a EMP bombs ...which has been a major topic in the blogsphere the last few days (see here and here for just two examples). Does China have an EMP bomb? Heck if I know. I'll let President Obama worry about it. But, to us, it does not matter: the basics of disaster preparedness are pretty much the same, regardless of the threat. The art and science of being able to cope with disasters is, by definition, the ability to cope with the unexpected. Just be prepared to be self-sufficient for an extended period of time -- then live your life with the peace of mind preparedness brings.

...there is a post that will be of great interest to you at Judy Curry's blog. The conclusion is that the atmospheric sensitivity to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration is 1.6°C. As you know, my guesstimate is 1.5°C, so it is very similar to the figure I use.  If those values are indeed correct, it means that GW is not a major problem. And, here's more... There is a new paper out that says (paraphrasing), "the more you know about science, the less you believe in global warming." I read the paper (so you don't have to) and while the authors have a large survey sample as these things go, the paper suffers because the authors seem convinced that not believing in GW is a bad thing. That leads to some rather tortured reasoning in the latter parts of the paper. The true believers over at Real Climate have a posting about the now-widely forecast solar minimum (something you've been reading about here since the earliest days of the blog in 2009). The p...

On several occasions ( here and here , to cite two examples), I have blogged about the quiet sun and the potential for it might cause global cooling. Even scientist friends of mine who are global warming advocates privately admit that significant cooling would be worse for humanity than warming. But, they quickly add, there's no chance of that happening (or words to that effect). Anthony Watts has a posting up that several researchers believe the sun's funk is not over and that we might go into another Maunder Minimum. Here is what Wikipedia says about that: The concept became notable after  John A. Eddy  published a landmark 1976 paper in  Science titled  "The Maunder Minimum" . [ 1 ]  Astronomers before Eddy had also named the period after the solar astronomer  Edward W. Maunder  (1851-1928) who studied how sunspot latitudes changed with time. [ 2 ]  The periods he examined included the second half of the 17th century. Edward Maunder publ...