There's something very off-putting about an academic or a scientist who engages in political activism having to do with his or her subject of study. Roger Caiazza addresses the downsides.
I did a review of Jacobson's 149 country WWS study as it pertained to the UK.
I found a serious error that rendered the entire study worthless.
The 149 country study makes extensive use of UTES (underground thermal energy storage) to replace natural gas for heating. Don't confuse that with geothermal heat pumps. The UTES system doesn't use heat pumps it simply collects heat in summer and stores it underground for winter use. Such systems do exist, but are not common because they are expensive (Jacobson conveniently excludes the cost of UTES from his estimates). They have a thermal efficiency of about 50%.
However, when calculating the energy required, Jacobson's study used a thermal efficiency of 400%, the figure appropriate for heat pumps. The study therefore underestimates the energy required for building heat by a factor of 8. Since most of the energy storage was being used to move solar energy from summer to winter, the amount of storage required is also underestimated by a similar factor.
The work cannot be corrected by using heat pumps instead of UTES because the energy system proposed in the study does not provide sufficient electrical generation capacity for heat pumps in winter.
This, and a number of smaller errors and false assumptions, as well as the omission of major items from the cost estimates render the study worthless, at least for the UK.
The same method has been used for all 149 countries, presumably the same errors have been made.
I don't know if studies for individual states in the USA contain similar errors.
When I pointed out the errors to Jacobson in an exchange of tweets, his reaction was to block me.
He continues to push his WWS studies knowing that they contain serious errors that render then useless.
I don't know why Stanford continues to employ him, perhaps there is a connection between his position and the anti-nuclear group that funds his department.
Papers on both sides were peer reviewed. I guess peer review depends on who are chosen to be the peers to do the reviewing. In other words, peer review has come to be pretty close to meaningless.
Solid illustrations of the perils of groupthink (on the part of Jacobson et al) and the utter devaluation of "peer review" as a quality control process.
I wrote my Substack "WWS" piece [link] because I kept seeing unbelievable claims about California Solar from MZJ on LinkedIn. One of my commenters then sent me a link to the Clack paper.
New York: keep following MZJ's "WWS" advice and you *will* become more Albania.
This article is a great example of why this subject doesn’t get properly covered in the MSM: it is detailed, thoughtful and data rich. The kind of litigious approach pursued by those who don’t have science on their side is much more likely to be covered. It is similar to the legislative approach in Canada designed to chill debate about fossil fuels and renewables. If reason is not on your side, go hostile and start yelling.
new category of generating resources called Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFR). Sounds like some kind of peaking nuclear simulur to gas peaking? Agree does not exist.
A fascinating wrinkle of Howarth's work claiming natural gas has a higher warming effect than coal is that it takes a 20 year time horizon to do it, as the methane rapidly changes into a small volume of CO2 without a very significant warming effect
According to Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute the 'discount rate' that is implied by this choice is well north of 10%. Because the real costs of warming are expected not in the next 20 years but later in the century and into the next most analyses of future climate costs use a discount rate of 2%. The difference is hard to describe. Trump's administration used a 7% discount rate to calculate the social cost of carbon to be about ten times less than the average analysis. Howarth is so far on the spectrum towards activist and away from scientist that he uses a higher implied discount rate than that, just to score a political win against LNG export development
The amount of damage charlatans like Jacobson and Howarth have done to the United States and other countries is unconscionable. Of course, the folks in power had to be ignorant fools or corrupt to fall for it, but still, they provided the thing idiots and thieves could point to and claim, "That proves this is a good idea."
I did a review of Jacobson's 149 country WWS study as it pertained to the UK.
I found a serious error that rendered the entire study worthless.
The 149 country study makes extensive use of UTES (underground thermal energy storage) to replace natural gas for heating. Don't confuse that with geothermal heat pumps. The UTES system doesn't use heat pumps it simply collects heat in summer and stores it underground for winter use. Such systems do exist, but are not common because they are expensive (Jacobson conveniently excludes the cost of UTES from his estimates). They have a thermal efficiency of about 50%.
However, when calculating the energy required, Jacobson's study used a thermal efficiency of 400%, the figure appropriate for heat pumps. The study therefore underestimates the energy required for building heat by a factor of 8. Since most of the energy storage was being used to move solar energy from summer to winter, the amount of storage required is also underestimated by a similar factor.
The work cannot be corrected by using heat pumps instead of UTES because the energy system proposed in the study does not provide sufficient electrical generation capacity for heat pumps in winter.
This, and a number of smaller errors and false assumptions, as well as the omission of major items from the cost estimates render the study worthless, at least for the UK.
The same method has been used for all 149 countries, presumably the same errors have been made.
I don't know if studies for individual states in the USA contain similar errors.
When I pointed out the errors to Jacobson in an exchange of tweets, his reaction was to block me.
He continues to push his WWS studies knowing that they contain serious errors that render then useless.
I don't know why Stanford continues to employ him, perhaps there is a connection between his position and the anti-nuclear group that funds his department.
Great information!
Papers on both sides were peer reviewed. I guess peer review depends on who are chosen to be the peers to do the reviewing. In other words, peer review has come to be pretty close to meaningless.
Thank you!
Solid illustrations of the perils of groupthink (on the part of Jacobson et al) and the utter devaluation of "peer review" as a quality control process.
I wrote my Substack "WWS" piece [link] because I kept seeing unbelievable claims about California Solar from MZJ on LinkedIn. One of my commenters then sent me a link to the Clack paper.
New York: keep following MZJ's "WWS" advice and you *will* become more Albania.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chrisbond/p/wws-what-stanford-prof-mark-z-jacobson?r=om40y&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Remarkable how ignorance is bliss. Truly head in the sand administrators.
This article is a great example of why this subject doesn’t get properly covered in the MSM: it is detailed, thoughtful and data rich. The kind of litigious approach pursued by those who don’t have science on their side is much more likely to be covered. It is similar to the legislative approach in Canada designed to chill debate about fossil fuels and renewables. If reason is not on your side, go hostile and start yelling.
The Net Zero target has neither scientific nor logical support
Terry Oldberg
Engineer/Scientist/Public Policy Researcher
terry_oldberg@yahoo.com
new category of generating resources called Dispatchable Emissions-Free Resources (DEFR). Sounds like some kind of peaking nuclear simulur to gas peaking? Agree does not exist.
A fascinating wrinkle of Howarth's work claiming natural gas has a higher warming effect than coal is that it takes a 20 year time horizon to do it, as the methane rapidly changes into a small volume of CO2 without a very significant warming effect
According to Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute the 'discount rate' that is implied by this choice is well north of 10%. Because the real costs of warming are expected not in the next 20 years but later in the century and into the next most analyses of future climate costs use a discount rate of 2%. The difference is hard to describe. Trump's administration used a 7% discount rate to calculate the social cost of carbon to be about ten times less than the average analysis. Howarth is so far on the spectrum towards activist and away from scientist that he uses a higher implied discount rate than that, just to score a political win against LNG export development
Thank you!
The amount of damage charlatans like Jacobson and Howarth have done to the United States and other countries is unconscionable. Of course, the folks in power had to be ignorant fools or corrupt to fall for it, but still, they provided the thing idiots and thieves could point to and claim, "That proves this is a good idea."