Best Energy Picks - August 24, 2024

Readers pass along a lot of stuff every week about natural gas, fractivist antics, emissions, renewables, and other news relating to energy.

Aug 24, 2024

This week’s best energy picks:

How Temperature Records Are Set — Climate NGOs Buying Their Way Into Government — We Found It’s all About the Money! — No, the U.S. Is Not Warming Faster Than the Rest of the World! — and much more.

How Temperature Records Are Set

Earlier this month the Met Office declared the hottest day of the year so far in the U.K. with the temperature reaching 34.8ºC in Cambridge. The Met Office claimed it was only the eleventh time since 1961 that the temperature had reached that level, with six of these occasions having been recorded in the last 10 years. Needless to say, missing from the account was a note that the station in Cambridge’s National Institute for Agricultural Botany (NIAB) is located just metres from a massive heat-generating electricity sub-station complex.
Electricity sub-stations give off so much heat into the surrounding atmosphere there are even plans to trap it for commercial use. The Cambridge station at Histon has recently benefitted from a £5 million upgrade including the installation of a third heat-pumping transformer. It is difficult to think of a worse place to locate an instrument to accurately measure nearby uncorrupted air temperatures, other than favoured Met sites at international airports and solar farms.
Cambridge NIAB crops up regularly in the Met Office’s local daily ‘records.’ Last year it claimed a recording at this site was the highest measured in the eastern region during September since 1949. The World Meteorological Office (WMO) rates Met Office sites from class 1 to 5 and Cambridge NIAB is said to have a pristine class 1 designation with no temperature ‘uncertainties’ due to local natural and unnatural influences. But how reliable is this superior rating? The view from Google Earth suggests that questions about its validity can legitimately be asked.

WMO guidelines state that any heat source in class 1 sites must be at least 100 metres away. But the google map above suggests that 100m is a very generous distance between the Histon grid and the red Met station marker.

The temperature records are, of course, notoriously corrupted by urbanization around the recording sites. How much more of the record-setting falls into this category?

Hat Tip: R.N./D.S.

Climate NGOs Buying Their Way Into Government

Is there any better evidence of the absolute corruption of government so pervasive today?

Non-profit public interest group Government Accountability Oversight has filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin’s Department of State for refusing to disclose records regarding alleged donor-financed climate activists working in state departments.
“Basic factual information like this is not privileged,” said Tom Kamenick, president of the Wisconsin Transparency Project which is representing GAO in court. “[The] Record custodian must redact privileged information and release the remainder – they cannot simply withhold the entire record. We are asking a judge to review these emails and determine whether they really are privileged.”

**Source: "Corruption box" by watchsmart is licensed under CC BY 2.0.**

GAO has alleged the U.S. Climate Alliance – a coalition of 24 governors including Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers – the state’ Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy, and other donors with ties to the United Nations are working together in a national climate campaign to fund staff in state offices nationwide.
“Progressive operatives are buying their way into high-level positions in state governments by paying the salaries of highly-placed administrators in state agencies to do particular work they want done, like pushing aggressive global warming policies,” GAO claimed in a release.

If we don’t reform the tax-exemption rules that allow this NGO corruption, our civili society is over.

Hat Tip: T.Z.

We Found It’s all About the Money!

Surprise, surprise:

An evaluation of more than 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries found that only 63 actually worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Subsidies and regulations—policy types often favored by governments—rarely worked to reduce emissions, the study found, unless they were combined with price-based strategies aimed at changing consumer and corporate behavior.
“The commonality in those successful cases is where we see subsidies and regulations being combined with price-based policy instruments,” said Nicolas Koch, senior researcher at the Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and an author of the study. “This means carbon pricing, and it could be energy taxes, it could be vehicle taxes.”

**Source: "Engagement Ring Luxury Tax Monopoly" by Philip Taylor PT is licensed under CC BY 2.0.**

The study, published today in the journal Science, used an AI algorithm to sift through a database of environmental prescriptions compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based economic agency, between 1998 and 2020. These policies ranged from energy-efficient standards for household appliances to a carbon tax on fossil fuels like oil and gas.
The fraction of policies that worked combined financial incentives, regulations and taxes, according to the study…
Climate experts said the study is a good road map for which policies work and can be updated to include data from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which is doling out an estimated $428 billion in subsidies, incentives and tax credits for climate-related projects.
“This study gives me confidence that we know what to do and how to do it,” said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, a New York-based carbon management firm, who wasn’t involved in the study.

This has to be one of the most incoherent dishonest pieces of reporting I’ve seen. First, we’re told subsidies don’t work, then we’re told they’re part of the policy mix needed, and then we’re told the ludicrously named Inflation Reduction Act is just chock-full of them and that’s just great. The real message, of course, is that the subsidy carrot is not enough to make people change their behavior and buy into the climate grift. Therefore, what's needed is a policy stick that forces us all to pay a luxury tax on gasoline and anything they don't like.

These people are just so damned disingenuous…

Hat Tip: J.C.

No, the U.S. Is Not Warming Faster Than the Rest of the World!

Let's just have the facts:

The idea that any given country is heating up faster than the rest of the world has been done to death, and has been claimed for just about every single country on the planet. It should be obvious that every place on earth cannot be warming faster than the rest of the world. Scientists are selecting regions and comparing them independently over different timeframes, using different datasets and methods, whatever timeframe is most optimal to show the most warming. This makes these comparisons basically worthless.
The fact for the United States is that the record of high temperature anomalies, that is, extreme heat, has not shown an increase in those high temperature events since the best records begin in 2005. (See figure below)

According to longer term data, heatwaves in the U.S. today are less frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s, as seen below:

Likewise, as discussed in this Climate Realism post, the change in the number of days with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit has actually declined for the majority of the country. Only 10 U.S. states show an increasing trend.
Even looking at proxy data globally which give an idea of ancient temperatures do not indicate we are in a period that can be described as “the hottest on record.” Today’s temperatures according to some sources appear similar to that of the Medieval or Roman warm periods, roughly 1000 to 2500 years ago, respectively. Media claims to the contrary are just propaganda.
The majority of the abnormal warming from last year occurred in Antarctica, where temperatures remained well below freezing, but was simply “less cold” than normally occurred during certain months, particularly September. A significant portion of last year’s heat globally was boosted primarily due to the natural El Niño cycle, which is known to bump up average temperatures for much of the globe. This effect is easily traced in the temperature records.

Nicely said!