Town Of Reutlingen Votes To Attempt Bad-Weather-Taming…In Bid To Reduce Hail Size, Storm Damage

By P Gosselin on 29. Juli 2014

Here’s the weather craziness of the week story.

Officials of the German town of Reutlingen have voted to allocate 50,000 euros in a bid to tame the bad weather that typically occurs during thunderstorms. The plan is to hire an airplane to spray silver iodide into storm clouds with the hopes of reducing the size of hail, and so reduce property damage on the ground.

Hat tip meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann at Twitter.

The Reutlinger General-Anzeiger writes:

Exactly one year since the devastating hailstorm over Reutlingen, local politicians indeed want to support the use of a hail plane. On Monday evening the county council voted by a wide majority to allocate 50,000 euros for this, a spokeswoman said.”

They actually believe this is going to work!

In response, high-profile Swiss meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann writes at Twitter: “Now it’s out: Germany’s dumbest politicians are located in the Reutlingen legislature.”

Mr. Kachelmann has written before on the topic of using the bright yellow “weather-making” chemical, claiming that the method has a very low success rate and that certain conditions have to be right on the borderline for it to work. Overall Kachelmann characterizes the practice as “nonsense”.

Kachelmann also notes with sarcasm that the process seems to work especially after weathermen have already forecast the desired effect is going to take place anyway. Wow, the hailstones were pretty small this time. The silver iodide spraying worked!

I’ve also inquired with veteran meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls of the European institute of Climate and Energy (EIKE). He also agrees that the spraying is nonsense, writing that “over the decades there have been serious! attempts time and again and entire projects devoted to this. All of them failed and were stopped.”

Citizens demanding politicians do something about the bad weather

Not only might the dumbest politicians be found in Reutlingen, but also the dumbest citizens, too. The Reutlinger General-Anzeige writes:

Lately in Reutlingen the call from citizens and companies for hail defense has gotten increasingly louder. In Stuttgart and in the Black Forest hail planes have been in use for years to prevent damage.”

Apparently the citizens of Reutlingen really do believe their local government has power over weather. Moreover, these citizens appear no longer able to take steps on their own to protect themselves – seemingly unaware that there are other options available to them, like insurance, or carports. Like the German government is expected to save the world’s climate, the citizens of Reutlingen also expect their local politicians to save them from bad weather.

If you happen to have a Brooklyn Bridge to sell, go to Reutlingen!

 

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Engineering Magazine: “Underestimated Danger: Every Month Ten Wind Turbines Get Destroyed by Fire”!

By P Gosselin on 28. Juli 2014

Never has such a lousy product been given so many free passes: wind turbines. Yes, they are lousy products – sorry!

In a free market, where poorly performing products get knocked out rapidly, wind turbines still can’t hold a candle to regular power plants. They only survive because of subsidies, and exorbitantly rosy promises.

Turbine burning

Burning wind turbine

Germany’s online engineering magazine Ingenieur.de here writes a short, but damning piece on wind turbine performance and reliability. Hat tip: Wolfgang Neumann at FaceBook. Ingenieur.de writes:

Lightening strikes, damage to power cable insulation, overheated gear-drives: Every month on average 10 wind turbines are destroyed by fire the British elite university Imperial College has found out in a study.” [...]

Scientist Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College emphasizes that the risk of fire has been played down many times. Worldwide on average only 1 wind turbine fire per month is made public. However, in fact the real figure is ten wind turbine fires on average according to investigations by the university.”

No matter how you calculate it, wind energy is terrible. Even the most amateur of engineers are able to appreciate the ultra harsh conditions that wind turbines must inherently withstand just due to their design and siting. The power generation unit is far above ground level and gets subjected to forces and conditions that way beyond anything conventional power plants situated in buildings at ground level are exposed to.

Then there’s the trend to put them offshore where conditions are even far more violent and menacing. Only one conclusion can be drawn on the wind turbine concept: the contraptions are impractical. It’s tantamount to using 500 laborers to do the job of a single Caterpillar excavator.

It boils down to the simple economic logic: Wouldn’t it just make much more sense to replace all these little bicycle generators, which are propped up on sticks hundreds of feet above ground way out in the hicks, with a single big one that’s at ground level (where fires at least can be fought), is easy to maintain, and can run continuously?

Ingenier.de writes that the fires often result in “total damage” to the wind turbine and that especially offshore turbine fires “lead to considerable damage to investors”.

Gradually the public is getting the picture that this wind energy idea is turning into a megaflop, one that reminds us of early airplane designs with flapping wings. Wind turbine producers sure have taken governments and consumers to the cleaners – to the tune of hundreds of billions. The public was sucked into buying a real lemon.

As a solution to the burning problem, experts are calling for “improved materials”.

Firemen unable to even get near the fire

When a fire does break out, Ingenieur.de reports that firemen can’t even get close to the fire because the turbines are so high above ground. And even if they could there’s an acute danger from falling parts and rotors, and so they refuse to get anywhere near the damn thing! All they can do is watch the contraption burn down.

Overall Guillermo Rein, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College, calls the results of the study “serious”.

Sounds like a nail in the coffin of a dumb idea that needs to be buried sooner than later.

Oh, there’s more. Rein will soon be publishing the results of a risk study that looks at solar energy. Get the popcorn ready.

 

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Leading German Alarmist Scientist Mojib Latif Turns Cool: “Climate Sensitivity Is Too High”!

By P Gosselin on 28. Juli 2014

Geomar scientist dares to go public, criticizes publication censorship: criticism of IPCC models unwanted!
By Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated/edited by P Gosselin)

Vladimir Semenov is a scientist at the Geomar Institute in Kiel, Germany. In 2009, together with colleague Mojib Latif and other colleagues, he submitted a manuscript to the Journal of Climate in which the authors feared that the CO2 climate sensitivity in the climate models was possibly pegged too high. During the peer-review process the reviewers requested that all passages containing doubt over Co2′s impact on climate be deleted, otherwise the paper would not get published. And so it happened: An entire section had to be removed before the study finally got published in 2010:

Semenov, V., Latif, M., Dommenget, D., Keenlyside, N., Strehz, A., Martin, T. und Park, W. (2010) The Impact of North Atlantic-Arctic Multidecadal Variability on Northern Hemisphere Surface Air Temperature Journal of Climate, 23 (21). pp. 5668-5677. DOI 10.1175/2010JCLI3347.1.

In the wake of the mobbing affair concerning the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute, Lennart Bengtsson, Mr. Semenov gathered the courage to take the issue to the public. He criticized that deleting the part challenging the IPCC model in his paper was a form of censorship.

The respected British daily The Times prominently reported on the matter on 8 July 2014 on the front page of its Environment section:

Voices of dissent drowned out by climate change scientists
Research that questioned the accuracy of computer models used to predict global warming was “censored” by climate scientists, it was alleged yesterday. One academic reviewer said that a section should not be published because it “would lead to unnecessary confusion in the climate science community”. Another wrote: “This entire discussion has to disappear.” The paper suggested that the computer models used by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were flawed, resulting in human influence on the climate being exaggerated and the impact of natural variability being underplayed. The findings could have profound implications. If correct, they could mean that greenhouse gases have less impact than the IPCC has predicted and that the risk of catastrophic global warming has been overstated. However, the questions raised about the models were deleted from the paper before it was published in 2010 in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. The paper had been submitted in July 2009, when many climate scientists were urging world leaders to agree a global deal on cutting emissions at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December that year. Vladimir Semenov, a climate scientist at the Geomar institute in Kiel, Germany, said the questions he and six others had posed in the original version of the paper were valid and removing them was “a kind of censorship.”

Continue reading at GWPF.

Also a presentation made by the Geomar team in July 2013 in den USA fits nicely (see our blog article “Mojib Latif in presentation in the USA: Climate sensitivity is set too high by the IPCC CO2“). With one exception (T. Martin), all the authors took a position that is identical to that in the publication in the Journal of Climate of 2010. In the conclusion of the presentation, the scientists state on slide no. 30:

(1) ‘MOC variability appears to be predictable about a decade ahead.’

(2) ‘The most recent decades contain a strong contribution from the AMO (MOC) even on a global scale,’ see also slide no.16.

(3) ‘This raises questions about the average climate sensitivity of the IPCC models,’ see also slide no. 21: ‘Implication: Climate sensitivity is too high’.

 

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Developers To Clear 850,000 Sq M Of Virgin Forests On UNESCO Nature Reserve To Make Way For 700-Foot Turbines

By P Gosselin on 27. Juli 2014

The days of an open welcome to “environmentally-friendly” wind parks in Germany are over.

When the turbines were small-scale and novel, people were generally open to them. But now that they have reached skyscraper dimensions, have proven to be unsightly, and have demonstrated poor performance, they are not welcome anymore.

Palantinate Forest

German developers plan to install 60 wind turbines, each 700-foot tall, in one of Central Europe’s last remaining untouched regions, the Palantinate Forest, a UN designated natural monument. Photo beauty-places.com/palatinate-forest

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the picturesque southwest German region of Palatinate, where the online Die Welt here reports on the mounting fierce opposition that wind turbine developers are facing. The developers have their sights aimed at the hilltops of Germany’s fairy-tale-like Palatinate forest…an area that has been designated by UNESCO as a natural treasure and biosphere reserve. Here they hope to install wind parks with skyscraper-dimensioned turbines. Die Welt writes of the area:

It was the first cross-border natural reservation of this type in all of Europe because it also includes the Alsatian mountain range. Not very many Germans know that it is the largest uninterrupted landscape in Central Europe. Whoever wishes to see it, had better hurry up.”

850,000 sq m of virgin forest to be cleared

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). Opponents are rallying, calling it a matter of “homeland defense”.

Die Welt provides the technical details of the monster-size turbines: Each blade is 60 meters long and they will need elaborate roads to allow their transport to the site where they are to be installed. Each turbine will require 3000 tonnes of concrete and 100 tonnes of steel. In total 200,000 tonnes of concrete and 130,000 cubic meters of gravel will have to be hauled in by 60,000 trips by heavy cargo vehicles, which will involve the burning of 600,000 liters of diesel fuel and the clearing of 850,000 square meters of virgin forest.

Like putting turbines on Ayer’s Rock!

Environmentalists are fuming. Opponents accuse the wind turbine developers and the local and state authorities of covering up the environmental costs and impacts of the project and misleading the public. Critics say the senselessness of the project is tantamount to putting wind turbines on Ayers Rock.

Unrealistic profit projections used to “bait the public”

Opponents also accuse the wind park developers of putting out overly optimistic figures for expected wind turbine performance in order to bait the public. Die Welt writes:

Ernst Gerber believes the promises of profitability, with which investors and local representatives are being baited, are estimates from a naïve milkmaid: ‘Despite the subsidies, things are moving towards the lower limits of profitability.’”

Die Welt itself characterizes the promise of profitability made by the wind park developers as “rotten”, and that the region is one that is “low in wind”.

Threat to wildlife…violates the law

The wind park opponents also say that the monster turbines are a threat to wildlife and birds. What’s more, turbine critic Rainer Becker thinks they would violate the law, “The construction of the wind parks are clearly in violation of the existing laws and the international species protection act“.

Other opponents claim that big business and power companies in Luxemburg are ramming the projects through and ignoring the wishes of the local inhabitants, Die Welt writes.

 

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So What’s The Real Reason South Polar Sea Ice Is Expanding? It’s The Cooling, Stupid!

By P Gosselin on 26. Juli 2014

By Ed Caryl

During the last three years, since 2011, the ice around Antarctica has been growing, in most seasons, more than during any similar periods of the satellite era where we have that data.

At first, the climate catastrophists ignored this phenomenon. When that became embarrassingly inconvenient, they began to blame it on instrument problems.

They detected a step-change in the data in 1991, but couldn’t decide which side of the step was the correct data, and the fault only excused about 5% of the increase. The step change supposedly occurred in 1991.Caryl_1 Caryl_1Caryl_1

Figure 1 is from the paper as described above. The step occurs at the end of 1991.

Caryl_2 Figure 2 is the satellite (RSS) lower troposphere temperature data for the southern hemisphere south of 20° South.

Note the step in July 1991. The step in temperature occurs in July 1991. What happened in the summer of 1991? Mount Pinatubo blew up on the 15th of June. How long does it take for volcanic equatorial cooling to reach 70° South? About six months. Can you see the step in the ice data? I can’t. It doesn’t show in the annualized ice date (Figure 4) either

Caryl_3

Figure 3: Hemisphere sea ice anomaly data in the satellite era. Source

If a real step was detected in the ice anomaly data, it coincides with a cooling step in the southern hemisphere temperature, and is real, not an instrumental artifact. To make it easier to see the trends, the next figure is annualized data, sea ice anomaly and temperature anomaly from satellite (RSS) for the latitudes of coastal Antarctic, 70°south to 60°south, with the trends. Temperature has been inverted to match the ice.

Caryl_4

Figure 4: Plot of the ice anomaly (annualized) and the temperature anomaly (also annualized) for the latitudes of coastal Antarctica.

It is apparent in Figure 4 that most of the changes in the ice anomaly plot match changes in temperature. Keep in mind that the temperature plot is inverted, cold is upward, warm downward, to match the behavior of the ice. The recent increase in ice is because it has gotten colder.

Though the temperature trend in the last 35 years is only slightly cooler, the ice has increased dramatically. Here are trend maps of the temperature changes in the polar regions in the last ten years from GISS. Compare the temperature changes along the coast of Antarctica to the ice anomaly map.

Caryl_5

Figure 5 is a map of the global temperature change over the last ten full years from GISS.

Note that the Global temperature trend from 2003 to 2013 in Figure 5 above, (top right corner) matches the 70° to 60° South decade trend in Figure 4.

Caryl_6

Figure 6 (right) is the current ice anomaly map for Antarctica. I turned it 90° counter clockwise to match the Antarctic as seen in Figure 5.

There is more ice where it has been colder. There are many gaps in the temperature data around Antarctica, especially ocean data. But even on the continent, station data is quite sparse and subject to UHI (Urban Heat Island) problems for the larger stations. That large orange spot in Antarctica in Figure 5 is due to McMurdo Station, the largest and most populous base on the continent.

The next largest heat source is the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

The ice around Antarctica is not increasing due to global warming. It is increasing due to global COOLING!

 

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Tol/Lomborg Becoming Powerful Voices Of Reason On Climate Policy In German Media: “1 Euro Costs…3 Cents Benefit”

By P Gosselin on 25. Juli 2014

Lomborg_1It seems that it is beginning to dawn on some of Europe’s mainstream media: The transition to green energies is turning out to be ten or even 100 times more expensive than what they were led to believe just a few years ago.

Increasingly we have been seeing reports featuring renowned climate economists such as Bjørn Lomborg or Richard Tol in the German-language mainstream media.

The message: Hey, this green energy policy really isn’t working well at all.

And again the climate policy critics Tol and Lomborg are being featured by the German-language media as respected dissident voices, this time by the online Austrian nachrichten.at in an article titled: 1 Euro Kosten, 3 Cent Nutzen. In English:

1 euro costs, 3 cents benefit

First the nachrichten.at discusses what could be the most economically sensible way of reducing CO2 emissions. So far the measures that have been implemented have been both effective and ineffective: Effective at costing lots of money, ineffective at actually reducing CO2 emissions.

The nachrichten.at writes that the most effective policy to reduce carbon emissions may be a CO2 tax, but then writes how Australia has just repealed it because of its sheer unpopularity.

The Austrian nachrichten.at then writes about the astronomical costs and the utter ineffectivity of climate policy so far:

Already the EU 2020 strategy costs 185 billion euros annually. By the end of the century the costs will run to 15 trillion euros. With this, according to the UN IPCC, the global temperature increase will be lowered 0.05°C. For every euro that the EU pays into climate protection, it prevents 3 cents worth of damage from climate change. Lomborg writes: ‘That is not rational policy!’”

The nachrichten.at quotes what Lomborg said in 2013:

If the measures against climate change are not economically efficient, then they will not be sustainable because countries struggling to emerge like India and China will not follow along.”

Tol U of SussexMoreover the article presents harsh criticism from Richard Tol, writing:

Trillions of euros, zero effect

What has been done and planned thus far has been a debacle. [...] Although the consequences of climate change cannot be denied, they have, however, been drastically overestimated. Tol accuses the climate scientists of acting ‘bitterly and politically’.”

Things are slowly changing. German language media are increasingly presenting other opinions to get the public to take another look at where the current, skewed energy policy is leading. That’s good news because a debate has long been sorely missing. As the costs skyrocket, the days of isolating divergent opinions may be ending.

Photo top right (Lomborg): Source
Photo bottom right (Tol): Source

 

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Why Does The Solar Cycle NOT Show Up In Climate Data?

By P Gosselin on 24. Juli 2014

By Ed Caryl

Several researchers have noted that the 11-year solar cycle does not show up in temperature or precipitation data. Most recently, Dr. David Evans has introduced his “notch filter” answer to the problem. I think the answer is much simpler.

The solar influence on earth has several components. The Total Solar Insolation (TSI), varies over the 11-year solar cycle by about 0.1%. Solar UV varies by much more, up to 10%, but those wavelengths carry much less energy than TSI, and affect only the top of the atmosphere. The solar wind has little energy, but influences the cosmic ray influx. Other influx, such as Forbush Events, from Coronal Mass Ejections (CME’s), have short term effects. These last two, the solar wind and Forbush Events, do not follow the solar cycle very closely, so tend not to show up in a time power spectrum of climate, or even of cosmic rays.

So why does the TSI cycle not show up in climate data? Because annual and daily changes completely drown out the signal. First, the earth’s orbit around the sun is not circular, but elliptical. We are closer to the sun during the northern hemisphere winter by 3.4% compared to the distance in the summer. Because the TSI varies by the square of the distance change, the change in TSI is 6.8% from summer to winter. This alone would make the 11-year 1% signal difficult to detect, but there are other, much large variations.

C_1

The earth is tilted on it’s axis by 23.5°. This causes a further variation in insolation even at the equator. At the equator, the annual variation is almost 12%, with the maximum occurring at the spring and fall equinoxes, and the minimum occurring on June 21st.

Figure 1: is the insolation seen at three different latitudes. Source here

At 40° latitude, this variation grows to over 100% around the average, and at 80° degrees, to over 200% around the average, including days of 24 hours of sunlight and more days of 24 hours of darkness.

Besides the large annual variations in insolation, there is the diurnal variation, night and day, with another signal that is nearly a square wave. But this isn’t all. The variation in clouds causes albedo changes that are nearly random, and imposed  on the above insolation curves. I say nearly random, because of solar effects on clouds due to changes in cosmic rays. But these effects have only small correlation with solar cycles.

So, a 0.1% TSI change on an 11-year cycle, is buried in the much larger annual orbital and axial tilt cycle, the diurnal cycle, as well as random albedo changes due to clouds. An analogy would be hearing the 50/60 Hertz power supply hum on your HiFi, while playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with cannons, at full volume.

 

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Spreading Climate-Religion Wackiness… Now “Mobile Phones Are Climate-Killers”…”13 Megatonnes Of CO2″!

By P Gosselin on 24. Juli 2014

Just a couple of anecdotes today to illustrate how wacky the climate-change religion is getting.

First is a short blurb appearing at the online Linux Magazine bearing the title: “Mobile phones are climate killers“. This is for real.

Using your mobile phone and sending text messages apparently is contributing to bad weather and the death of the climate. Linux magazine writes:

The greenhouse gases coming from the recharging of mobile phone and tablets – this year already will be 6.4 megatonnes, about half of what is projected for 2019, – is equivalent to the emissions of about 1.1 million cars.”

Linux Magazine cites a study conducted by Juniper Research.

The other sign showing the climate trend is getting increasingly kooky that caught my eye today is a photo posted by Rudolf Kipp at Facebook.

Kipp wine

Photo: Rudolf Kipp

Would you like your wine dry, sweet…or green?

I’m sure glad I drink Scotch instead. And when it comes to wine, I never liked Dornfelder anyhow.

And seeing how masses of people are stupid and gullible enough to accept all the nonsense hook, line and sinker, a little Scotch now and then certainly helps.

And a final word to all the distillers of Scotch out there. I warn you: If I hear or see any of this bio/sustainable madness with regards to the production of your products, then I’ll never buy another bottle from you again. I hope especially you Islay distillers take note.

 

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75,000 See Their Investments Shrivel…Spectacular $1.9 BIllion German Wind Energy Company Insolvency!

By P Gosselin on 23. Juli 2014

ProkonOnline German DW public radio brings us a report on the latest developments concerning the Prokon Holding GmbH & Co. Verwaltungs-KG wind-park investment debacle.

Image: Prokon

The Itzehoe, Germany based Prokon was founded in 1995 and specialized in the planning, financing and construction of onshore wind-parks in Germany, Poland and Finland. Prokon’s business model had come under scrutiny several times in the past, with some even warning that it resembled a Ponzi scheme. Instead of securing financing from banks and lending institutions, the company attracted capital from private persons, enticing them with promises of high rates of return and a contribution to protecting the climate. Early on many politicians praised the model.

Since it was founded in 1995, the company raised 1.4 billion euros ($1.9 billion) by “advertising directly to the public, touting profit participation rights and promises of superb annual returns” to potential private investors. In total 75,000 investors took up the offer. But as time went on critics began to accuse the company of using fresh money coming from new investors to pay the returns for the older investors. They warned that it was only a question of time before the scheme would collapse.

The critics were right: On January 22, 2014, the company declared insolvency. Prokon’s pony-tailed managing director Carsten Rodbertus, however, insisted that the company was still “essentially healthy”, and then blamed the investors for the debacle because they demanded the high returns that had been promised, or a refund of their principle, Spiegel wrote.

Spiegel also wrote that the woes were not only unique to Prokon, but to many windpark developers all over Germany. “In courts around the country, complaints are mounting from wind park investors who haven’t received a dividend disbursement in years or whose parks went belly up. Consumer protection activists are complaining that many projects are poorly structured and lack transparency.”

Meanwhile yesterday a number of investors gathered to vote on how the insolvent Prokon company would proceed in order to settle the 391 million euros ($542 million) in outstanding investor claims. They voted to sell off some of Prokon’s assets in a desperate attempt to “recoup at least some of their original investment.”

The Prokon debacle has even led the German government to introduce new rules to regulate how financial products may be advertised to retail investors. However, for the 75,000 Prokon investors, the new rules will come too late.

 

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Leading German Private Commercial Meteorologist: “No Statistical Basis” Showing Winters Are Getting Warmer

By P Gosselin on 23. Juli 2014

Jung_TwitterPrivate commercial meteorologist are always under pressure to produce reasonably accurate forecasts for their clients and to stick to the best available science. If their models and work consistently produce false results, then it is not long before they find themselves looking for a new line of work. There’s no room for politics in their trade.

Photo: meteorologist Dominik Jung, Twitter

No trend to anything unusual

One of Germany’s leading private commercial meteorologists, Dominik Jung of wetternet.de, gives an interview at the online Hessische/Niedersächsische Allgemeine Zeitung (HNA). Jung says storms and variable weather are nothing new in Germany, and that there is no trend pointing to any unusual changes.

So far this summer Germany has seen a fair amount of variable weather, with several periods of a few hot days followed by cooler rainy days. HNA asked Jung if this was unusual and if spells of sunny, hot summerlike weather had not been longer in the past. The HNA gives us Jung’s answer: “No. Weeks-long warm periods with long-lasting heat are not typical for our region.”

Summers getting wetter, contradicting climate models

On whether German summers are becoming drier, as many climate scientists once projected: “In the past years six were wetter than the long-term average. The summer of 2013 was a bit too dry.”

Winters are not getting warmer

The HNA also brings up the often mentioned claim that German winters are becoming warmer, and that snow and frost will soon become “a thing of the past”. It writes: Also the suspicion that winters are getting warmer cannot be statistically asserted. Over the past seven years many of the winters were very cold with long periods of snow and ice.”

Increased storm activity in Germany?

The HNA also asked Jung about storm frequency and severity. Here as well the high-profile meteorologist sees no statistical basis. The HNA writes : “According to Jung, there is no detectable increase. The UN IPCC report also comes up with the same result. … statistically there hasn’t been any more such storms than there was 100 years ago.”

On rising insurance claims due to storm damage, Jung says that the rising trend has much more to do with the higher number of people insuring their assets, and is not a measure of storm activity.

Jung also says that spring on average is arriving about one or two weeks earlier than it did 3o years ago. Here Jung does not mention that 30 years ago some importanct ocean cycles were in their cold phases. Climate is changing, but that change is due in most part to natural cycles, which even alarmist scientists have been conceding lately every time they claim “the warming is being masked by natural variations.”

Climate change is natural

When asked if the fluctuiations are a tell-tale sign of climate change, Jung dumps cold water on that claim as well. The HNA reports: “For meteorologist Jung there is currently no acute effects of a climate change. Climate has been changing since the earth was created, and it will continue to do so in the decades and centuries ahead.”

 

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NCEP Data Show June 2014 Among The Coldest This Century! Four Of Five Coldest In The Last 5 Years

By P Gosselin on 22. Juli 2014

UPDATE: Read meteorologist Joe D’Aleo: Should you trust NOAA claims about May and June records?
And: Who needs Antarctic data or temps near ice.
********************************

Some government scientists, it seems, are so obsessed and convinced with their global warming theory that they’d rather alter the observed data to suit their theory than to alter their theory so that it agrees with the data.

Over the last day or so reports have been appearing, e.g. here and here, claiming June 2014 globally was the hottest ever recorded. However data from National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) show it’s not true (never mind all the cold reports coming from places ranging from Alabama, to the Alps, to Antarctica).

Unfortunately, some journalists are either too lazy or just too incompetent to check the facts.

At Twitter meteorologist Joe Bastardi has also posted a graphic comparing two charts from NCEP: June 2006 vs June 2014.

Bastardi_Global

As NECP shows, June 2014 is significantly colder than 2006.

In fact, Joe provides a useful link that allows comparison for every year and every month.

Here are the NCEP CFSR global temperature results for June for the last 15 years with the ranking (warmest 1, coldest 15).

2014: +0.059 (12)
2013: +0.057 (13)
2012: +0.089 (9)
2011: +0.003 (14)
2010: +0.075 (10)
2009: 0.137 (6)
2008: 0.064 (11)
2007:  0.137 (6)
2006: 0.305 (2)
2005: 0.296 (3)
2004: 0.115 (8)
2003: +0.144 (5)
2002: 0.346 (1)
2001: 0.148 (4)
2000: -0.037 (15)

The data above illustrate a couple of things going on. Firstly, June 2014 is nowhere near “the warmest on record”. It is among the coldest of the 21st century.

Secondly the colder mean global June temperatures have occurred during the recent years, and the warmer ones earlier in the century (exception 2000), thus indicating that Junes have been cooling off. In fact, 4 of the 5 coldest Junes this century occurred in the last 5 years.

Indeed it’s little wonder that many areas are recording increasing number of cold events and the polar ice caps have been rebounding…all while dubious scientists have been claiming that the earth is heating up, backing such nonsensical claims with altered and tampered data. And at the rate the data fiddling is taking place and the earth is cooling off, we soon will be able to expect little ice age conditions at “record high” temperatures.

The only way the activist scientists will be able to save face, it seems, will be for the government to step in and declare climate data as official state secrets whose access will require special security clearances.

 

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Germany’s Habitually AWOL Green Energy…Installed Wind/Solar Often Delivers Less Than 1% Of Rated Capacity!

By P Gosselin on 21. Juli 2014

Germany today likes to boast a total of 36,000 megawatts of installed photovoltaic capacity and over 30,000 MW capacity of wind power. Theoretically at noon on a sunny, windy day Germany could cover almost all of its electric power demand, which at noon on a workday is roughly 70,000 megwatts.

But anyone familiar with Germany’s climate knows the country’s weather is often gray and sees about as much sunshine as Alaska does. Germany has a fair amount of windy days, but periods of windless days are also frequent enough. They can’t be avoided and must be reckoned with. In a nutshell, solar and wind power production are often AWOL and so conventional power systems (coal, gas, nuclear) always need to be on standby, ready to deliver on a minute’s notice.

To illustrate, the following chart depicts German electric power production and consumption over the 6-day period 14-19 July: conventional power (gray), solar production (yellow), wind (dark blue), hydro (light blue) and biomass (green). German consumption is shown by the red line.

agora_20July2014
Image: agora-energiewende.de

Readers immediately notice the huge fluctuations in solar and wind power outputs. At night there’s no sun and the wind appears only sporadically.

The data from the above chart show, for example, that at 9 p.m. on July 16 total wind power output was a mere 0.334 gigawatts and the day’s last rays of sunlight were delivering only 0.103 gigawatts of power. That means the two sources of wind and solar combined were putting out only [(0.334 + 0.103)/65]100 = 0.7% of their rated capacity. That in turn means the remaining 99.3% had to come in large part from the conventional coal, nuclear and gas power plants.

Germany’s installed wind/solar systems on average operate roughly at about 15% of their capacity.

Moreover the chart shows that wind energy output was close to zero for a period of three days (July 16 – 19). Little wonder that wind and solar have yet to replace a single conventional coal power plant in Germany. No matter how much installed solar/wind capacity the country has, it still has to rely on conventional power on windless nights, which are frequent enough.

The result is that the economics of wind/solar energy are just plain awful. To illustrate, imagine the costs involved in being forced to own two cars: an expensive one that runs on average only 1 random day a week, and a cheaper one that can run anytime. Whenever you want to drive, you are first required to drive the expensive/unreliable one. Only when it doesn’t start up are you allowed to drive the cheaper, always operable car. Obviously such a model of personal transportation (being forced to own, maintain, insure and repair two cars) would bankrupt most working-class households.

Today’s green wind/solar energy makes little economic sense.

 

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Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: “Planet Is Going To Be Cooling Next 20 To 30 Years Because Of Natural Processes”

By P Gosselin on 20. Juli 2014

Veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi at his WeatherBell Analytics site has posted the latest Saturday Summary.

bastardi_home Weatherbell

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi. Photo credit: WeatherBell Analytics

Just before the 3-minute mark he comments on the general nonsense behind the claims that global warming causes more cold weather and on how John Holdren, senior advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology, “was mouthing off on how global warming was causing it to get so cold back in January”.

At the 3:08 mark Joe reiterates his long term forecast for global temperatures:

“I do think the planet is going to be cooling the next 20 to 30 years due to natural processes. But some of these explanations border on inane”

He then reminds viewers that those blaming the cold on warming “obviously do not make forecasts for a living“.

Trapped heat constantly AWOL

And already we see that the earth’s temperature has not risen in almost 18 years. This year’s once forecast “super El Nino” is failing to materialize, which raises the question as to where all “the missing heat” could possibly be lurking.

It’s turning out that the missing heat is wholly theoretical and exists only in climate models, and is nowhere to be observed in reality.

Predictions of it reappearing have failed over and over again.

 

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German Wind Turbine Investors Dissolve Operating Company After 13 Years Of Poor Returns, Technical Failures

By P Gosselin on 19. Juli 2014

There are lots of claims on how successful Germany’s renewable energy program has been. Feed-in tariffs mandated by the government guaranteed profits for windpark investors and operators. You couldn’t lose. So it seemed at first.

Unfortunately outputs promised by wind turbine manufacturers and proponents have fallen short of expectations. Moreover, high maintenance costs have in many cases eliminated profits and resulted in losses for investors. As generous as the subsidies may be, profit from wind can be elusive.

So it comes as no surprise when we here how a group of 60 limited partners near Ettenheim southwest Germany have decided to dissolve the wind turbine operating company they had set up in December, 2000. Story in German at www.windwahn.de here. It lost money.

The 60 limited partners unanimously voted on Wednesday to shut down and liquidate the Windpark Ettenheim GmbH & Co. According to Windwahn, the wind turbine had been supplied by Nordex and “did not yield the expected performance“, so says managing director Andreas Markowsky.

Windwahn writes:

It stood still for years, and finally it was taken down in the summer of 2013. In the meantime the concrete pad has also been removed. After the liquidation is completed, the area where the turbine stood will be re-naturalized under the supervision of forest authorities. …The wind turbine did not pay off.”

Windwahn writes that the turbine had been supplied by Nordex and came with a 5-year maintenance contract. But in the end, the turbine remained plagued by technical problems and the 60 partners all had to take a moderate loss on the investment: a bit more than 1000 euros per 2500 euro share.

Markowsky says that the turbine had serious technical problems from the start. For example when winds were strong during stormy weather, the turbine stood still instead of producing maximum output. The limited partners even had to take Nordex to court in bid to be awarded compensation in the amount of 1.8 million euros. Windwahn writes that the case dragged on for 5 years, during which the turbine remained idle and did not deliver any power. Finally, the court awarded the limited partners 1.4 million euros in compensation.

The limited partners had the chance to reduce their losses by taking advantage of the re-powering bonus offered by the German government. Under the scheme turbine operators are paid a bonus to trade up their old turbines for newer, more efficient ones. However, the bonus has been scrapped by the German government, effective August 1, and the offer ultimately was passed up.

The 60 limited partners have had enough of the wind energy business.

 

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Deflated Schellnhuber Views Global Warming As A 21st Century Asteroid Strike…Complains No One Is Listening

By P Gosselin on 18. Juli 2014

German reggae and hip hop musician Pierre Fox presents a revealing interview (in German) with Prof. Dr. Hans Schellnhuber (28 June 2014).

When it comes to the progress of the green movement and the Great Transformation, the Potsdam Professor appears deflated and demoralized.

No matter what one may think of the German Godfather of climate alarmism, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber is always fascinating to watch, never failing to deliver comments worth quoting. He’s the professor that once claimed that glo´bal temperature changed linearly with atmospheric CO2 change, and said that the planet would explode with 9 billion people. He also said that a population of 1 billion be an acceptable level.

Like a doomsday “asteroid collision in slow motion”

Already at the 0:14 mark after having said what a unbelievable privilege it is to work at the Potsdam Institute he states:

One day our eyes opened: “Oh! I’m now researching on aspects of the greatest problem facing mankind in the 21st century. And this conviction hardened. Yes, this is the greatest problem of the 21st century.”

At the 1:12 mark Schellnhuber spectacularly piles on the dramatization when it comes to characterizing the seriousness of global warming, comparing it to an approaching asteroid collisions with the earth.

I compare it to an asteroid colliding with the earth in slow motion, yes. If scientists said an asteroid is on a path toward the earth and that we have 20 years to build a defense system, we probably would all start to do everything we could and build away, and wouldn’t care if it cost 50 billion or a thousand billion. But when I say an asteroid is approaching, and that it is called global warming, but the strike will be over 100 years, everyone asks, ‘So what?’. [...] Mankind has a hard time planning 20 or 30 years ahead.”

Here we need to conduct a survey of scientists: “Do you believe global warming is as serious as an earth-shattering asteroid strike?” I seriously doubt many scientists would share Professor Schellnhuber’s earth’s doomsday paranoia.

Democracy as an obstacle

On whether politicians are doing enough, Schellnhuber thinks they are moving slowly, but says that new systems of doing things often take time to unfold. But once they are 20 or 30% in place a tipping point is reached, and there is nothing to stop the shift to the new system. As an example at the 3:42 mark he gleefully cites the fact that share prices of Germany’s major power producers have collapsed.

Ten years ago that was unimaginable. …Suddenly this quaint little feed-in act had an effect. It was just a toy from green politicians.”

Schellnhuber places his optimism in system change and not in political progress. He views gradual political movement and compromise as obstacles to progress. No surprise here, Schellnhuber was never a fan of democracy by independently thinking citizens.

At the 4:44 mark when asked what individuals can do, the Potsdam professor says, “We need societal forces that aim to achieve justice…climate change is an extremely unjust matter, yes…forces that are based on values, the protection of creation – if I want to be religious, and so on. Otherwise we just aren’t going to be able to build the political pressure.”

Conferences: most “frustrating and tiring events ” in the world

Prof. Schellnhuber is clearly frustrated that climate policy has bogged down, and says the UN climate conferences are probably the most “frustrating and tiring events in the world”.

Later in the interview viewers can witness the sort of nonsense that is produced when a climate professor and a reggae singer discuss economics in an exchange. Schellnhuber believes that divestment could be an effective strategy, if only it were possible to convince investors that oil, gas, and coal are dangerous to the planet. Schellnhuber doesn’t seem to be aware that investment in wind parks and solar systems have already failed.

Slowly one begins to perceive that Prof Schellnhuber is on another planet (one that is about to be hit by an asteroid and where renewable energy works). His solution to get things moving: Get the population to think like he does, and only then will they invest in green energies. He then blames the “inner laziness” of the population to do the right thing, and says that “perhaps we need regulations, laws…compulsion.”

Resigned and frustrated, Schellnhuber spurned by Merkel

At latter stages of the interview, at the 10:20 mark, having worked himself up, Schellnhuber displays a combination of frustration and resignation…as if the human population were hopeless. At the 10:34 mark Schellnhuber contemplates that if only Obama could be re-elected again, and if “Merkel did not run for fourth term“. Here Schellnhuber de facto confirms what some of us have already began to suspect: Merkel has stopped listening to him and the Potsdam scientists.

The only hope left for the climate movement, Schellnhuber summarizes, is great leadership coming from somewhere. “A few climate Ghandis wouldn’t be bad.”

The warmists are becoming demoralized.

 

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