The North-Eastern U.S. is experiencing record-breaking cold. Even the very sharks are dying as they swim.
Happily the New York Times is here to put it all in context. It’s all further evidence of global warming, of course!
All is ‘explained’ in a story headed “Why so cold? Climate Change May Be Part of the Answer”
As bitter cold continues to grip much of North America and helps spawn the fierce storm along the East Coast, the question arises: What’s the influence of climate change?
Some scientists studying the connection between climate change and cold spells, which occur when cold Arctic air dips south, say that they may be related. But the importance of the relationship is not fully clear yet.
The Arctic is not as cold as it used to be — the region is warming faster than any other — and studies suggest that this warming is weakening the jet stream, which ordinarily acts like a giant lasso, corralling cold air around the pole.
The facts need not detain us here – because there aren’t any. It’s just speculation – “could”, “may” – gleaned from conversations with tame “experts” at institutions like the notoriously alarmist and fervently left-wing Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. And there’s plenty more nonsense where this came from, as Thomas Williams reported here earlier.
This determination to argue, against all evidence, that the planet is in a warming phase and that we must do more to try to cool it down would be quite funny if it didn’t have such terrible real world consequences.
One of these is the current energy crisis being experienced across New England. Blue states which bought into the man-made global warming narrative, shut down their coal-fired power stations, rejected the Access Northeast Pipeline and instead, despoiled their landscapes with more ugly, expensive, bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes are now paying a bitter price.
As Michael Bastasch reports at Climate Change Dispatch:
Unrelenting cold since late December has caused energy demand to spike, pushing up prices and straining supplies. New England power companies are struggling to keep up with demand.New England’s current energy woes are the result of years of state and federal policies aimed at closing coal and oil-fired power plants, largely as part of the region’s effort to fight global warming.
Yep. It’s true that mostly liberals are affected by this – and created this mess. But still, liberals’ children feel the cold as badly as conservatives’ children. In fact, being less robust and more snowflakey, probably even more so. Must they really suffer for their parents’ stupidity?
Another is the havoc the green ideology has wreaked on honest science and on once-trustworthy government institutions such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The doughty Paul Homewood has unearthed what looks very much like yet another NOAA data-rigging scandal.
Put simply, researchers such as Marlene Kretschmer – the expert from the Potsdam Institute heavily quoted in the New York Times piece – are trying to pin recent cold winters on movements of the jet stream. This enables them to promote their “global warming is still happening” narrative. But for it to work it requires them to write off the recent cold winters, such as the one in 2013/14, as being “anomalous” – ie abnormally cold.
If they are anomalous, though, how come this fact doesn’t show up in NOAA’s temperature charts?
Homewood notes:
When she introduced [Kretschmer’s] work on the subject in 2014, Jennifer Francis specifically referred to the severe cold snap that affected the Northeast in January and February 2014, using it as an example.The cold weather began on Jan 2nd, and lasted into April.Yet again NOAA show absolutely nothing unusual going on in either of those months..
Homewood smells a rat:
Put very simply, NOAA’s temperature record bears no relevance to reality.
Knowing what I do of NOAA’s data-faking track record, I think I’m inclined to agree…
During a recent trip to Maine, my wife and I noticed the large number of wind turbines cluttering the peaks of the ridges around the otherwise scenic New England countryside, particularly in Vermont. There really are a lot of them, and that’s the result of an ongoing push to get the region onto renewable energy as much as possible. Vermont in particular has been hammering wind power as the path to cut carbon emissions and make the state truly green in nature. And they’ve achieved an admirable level of success, despite the fact that people living near the wind farms are being driven batty by all the noise and the state is being forced to enact additional restrictions on turbine operation.
But for the most part, as I said, that was all well and good… at least as long as the weather was pleasant. Now, however, as I’m sure any of you living in the northeast are aware, there’s a blistering bubble of arctic air throwing the region into a deep freeze. Suddenly the power grid is experiencing strains which aren’t generally seen in more clement weather conditions. So how are they responding? Local Hartford, Vermont blogger Meredith Angwin has been keeping an eye on the grid and she’s seeing an alarming trend (or at least alarming to environmentalists). As the temperature dropped, wind energy production waned just as demand was rising. And the local power companies responded by… burning oil.
During cold snaps, gas pipelines must supply homes first, and gas-fired power plants get short-changed. ISO-NE has a Winter Reliability Program which mainly compensates gas-fired power plants for keeping fuel on site: oil or LNG or CNG. (Liquefied or compressed natural gas.) The grid was running about 22% oil at 5:30 this evening.
The current Winter Reliability program is described in an update presentation, given December 7, 2017 by Anne George of ISO-NE. On page 5, Ms. George describes the current winter reliability program, which pays oil and gas fired generators to have fuel on site. (Page numbers are at the lower right of each viewgraph.) On page 18, she describes how the forward capacity auctions are attracting new generation, even as older plants retire. Specifically, ISO-NE is attracting new dual-fired natural gas resources: gas turbines that can also burn oil, and therefore can store oil on-site for cold weather.
In a follow-up post, Angwin records what happens to the grid as the temperature falls further. By the time it was down to one degree (!) the average cost of electricity on the grid had spiked from $200 per megawatt hour (Mwh) to over $300 / Mwh, with some areas reaching as high as $338. In addition to that, the percentage of energy on the grid coming from burning oil in dual-purpose plants (which can also use natural gas when it’s available) had jumped up to account for nearly one third of the total load.
No comments:
Post a Comment