All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

[Terrel L. Shields]

Beer produces carbon dioxide. Watching Martha Stewart putting yeast in a bread mix and all those little bubbles... CO2... She must be an anti-tree hugging commie...and as we all know she is a crook - about the only person to go to jail over the financial crisis. She must have caused it all. What an awful person.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Solar power in crisis: 'My panels generate enough power for two loads of washing'

Endless energy from the sun looked like a long-term solution for running our homes. But now the state has pulled the plug on the subsidies that made panels affordable for many. What happens now?


Sit back, relax, and read this story with an untroubled conscience: it has been created on a laptop and mobile phone powered entirely by the rays of the sun. This feat would surely astound the most idealistic Greek philosopher or Victorian entrepreneur. It would confirm their wildest hopes for humanity’s progress. Perhaps they would be even more amazed that it was possible via a coalition of Chinese companies, British roofers and local councils. Oh, and government support, which is set to be abruptly withdrawn.

The power comes from 16 black Ja solar panels that were fitted to the roof of my home in August. Together, these panels, each the size of a coffee tabletop, have a capacity of 4kW, enough to meet the energy needs of an average family home. Today, a gloomy autumnal moment, they have generated 4.403kWh. It hardly sounds impressive – it’s enough power for a couple of loads of washing – but collectively it represents a revolution. Solar hasn’t changed my life, but it has shifted my perceptions. A little monitor on my desk tells me how much electricity I am generating. I’m acutely aware of the scarcity of energy, the rarity of unbroken sunshine and changing path of the sun. In August, rays hit my panels at 8.30am and an image of a green finger materialised on my monitor, urging me to switch on appliances. Now it doesn’t appear until 10.30am and so we delay putting on the washing machine. We have toddlers around the house all day, so solar suits us: we time the dishwasher for daylight hours and the TV tends to be on more during the day than at night. If I’m working from home, I charge laptops and phones around midday, too. Solar’s drawback is that most power is generated in daylight hours, when people tend to be at work, and there’s currently no affordable battery technology to store the energy you generate. But that energy is not wasted: it goes into the national grid, and solar owners are paid for what they produce.

A million British homes now have rooftop solar panels. The thicker panels are solar thermal and heat water. Most, some 750,000 solar PV installations, convert the sun into electricity. Solar produces 1.5% of total UK electricity, up from virtually nothing in 2010. It has proved so popular that the government wants to cut the feed-in tariff, the solar subsidy, by 87%. Since 2010, domestic and commercial solar systems have been paid by the government for every kWh they generate. I receive quarterly payments for the electricity I generate at 12.96p per kWh with another smaller payment for what the authorities estimate I return to the grid. These payments are guaranteed for 20 years. Such has been the popularity of solar that the government says it is spending too much money supporting it: from January, it is proposing to dramatically slash this subsidy for new solar installations. The Solar Trade Association has warned this could cost up to 27,000 jobs; 1,000 are already disappearing with the recent closure of four big renewable companies. Will this solar miracle be shattered? Will rooftop panels soon resemble the relics of a bygone energy age, like the enormous cooling towers of coal-fired power stations?

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...isis-panels-generate-power-government-subsidy

The government guarantees the ratepayer a check based upon power generated. Not bad. If the U.S. wanted solar as bad as the U.K., it should do the same. Of course jobs would be created and solar businesses would boom. Everyone gets rich off the taxpayer, getting guaranteed payments for solar energy produced for 20 years, what's wrong with this picture?

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Coal Trumps Solar in India

DHARNAI, India—One year ago, environmentalists hailed this tiny village as the future of clean energy in rural India. Today, it is powered by coal.

Dharnai, a community of about 3,200 people in eastern India’s Bihar state, had been without electricity for three decades. So when activists with Greenpeace set up a solar-powered microgrid in July of 2014, the excitement was palpable. But, residents said, the problems started almost immediately.

When the former chief minister of Bihar state visited to inaugurate the grid, villagers lined up to protest, chanting, “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!”

By “real,” they meant power from the central grid, generated mostly using coal. By “fake,” they meant solar.

Analysts say the story of Dharnai illustrates how difficult it can be to provide reliable, high-quality electricity to the world’s poor without using the central grid. The challenge is coming into focus as Prime Minister Narendra Modi moves forward on an ambitious pledge to generate 175 gigawatts from utility-scale solar and wind energy by 2022 and increase coal-powered generation. Much of that power would go into the central grid, rather than being disseminated through small, decentralized energy systems.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-trumps-solar-in-india/

Hmmm ... the poor in India recognized problems with 100% fake electricity ... wait until California gets 50% of its electricity from solar and wind.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Is shrinking superstorm evidence of climate change on Jupiter?

It makes our most turbulent terrestrial storms look like mere pipsqueaks. But remarkable new Hubble footage shows that Jupiter\'s Great Red Spot -- an anticyclonic storm system twice the size of Earth -- is shrinking and turning orange. Is this evidence of Jovian climate change? And could the planet\'s violent storm finally be giving way to more clement conditions, at least by Jupiter\'s dramatic standards?

Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is a gas giant dominated by hydrogen with some helium and smaller amounts of other gases, a mixture that resembles the composition of the early solar nebula and results in some staggeringly beautiful weather. The planet\'s cloud systems, which counter-rotate in zones and belts, with eastward and westward winds reaching 100 meters per second, are among the solar system\'s most spectacular sights and come in a blaze of different colors -- red due to ammonia, white due to ammonium hydrosulphide, and brown and blue due to additions to water ice.

We do know that Jupiter emits 67% more radiation than it receives from the Sun. This is due to an internal heat source, which is thought to drive much of Jupiter\'s weather, including, presumably, the Great Red Spot. The heat likely is generated by the gradual contraction of matter under Jupiter\'s enormous gravity. In the planet\'s deeper layers, for example, hydrogen enters a liquid metallic state and the pressure is 3m atmospheres.

We also know that after years of relative stability, the Great Red Spot is now changing. Since 2012, Hubble observations as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program have shown that the spot has been shrinking -- and that the rate of shrinkage has increased in recent years. The latest measurement, published by Amy Simon and colleagues, show a further reduction of 240km, although this rate of shrinkage is less than in preceding years and there are not enough observations yet to know if this is a periodic feature as seen with Neptune\'s great dark spot.

http://www.thefrontierpost.com/arti...rstorm-evidence-of-climate-change-on-jupiter/

In the case of Jupiter, a gas planet composed almost entirely of the non-IR-active, non-greenhouse gases hydrogen and helium, there is no solid planetary surface nor greenhouse gases to allegedly "trap" solar radiation, yet Jupiter has an "internal heat source" that causes a thermal enhancement ("gravito-thermal greenhouse effect") resulting in emission of 67% more radiation than it receives from the Sun.

Just something to think about as the Climate Scientists ignore gravity and other variables.

 

[George Hatch]

Reliables vs Unreliables

A hospital can't wait to schedule surgeries for when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing - they need a reliable power source that's available upon command. That reliable availability has its costs.

 

[Elliott]

"Imagine you're a bird and you're flying in the Mohave Desert along the California side of the Nevada border and in the distance you see a massive reflective field, kind of like a lake, but more like thousands of puddles hovering together in a herd. You see insects swarming around it. You're hungry and thirsty. Or maybe you're just curious. So, you decide to fly over and see what's up.

This is the series of events that researchers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service witnessed last fall at the 377-megawatt Ivanpah power plant and which they describe in an avian mortality report released last month by the California Energy Commission. (KCET, a public television station in California obtained a copy of the report months earlier.) The report, which calls the Ivanpah solar power plant a "megatrap," issues grave warnings about the threat that this relatively new technology poses to all species of birds. It also offers some basic recommendations for how to make solar thermal safer for birds, both at the Ivanpah plant and at future facilities—because, yes, newer, bigger ones are already on the way."

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise...-solar-plant-turns-birds-into-smoke-streamers

 

[Randolph Kinney]

2015 Likely to Be Hottest Year Ever Recorded

The immediate cause of the record-breaking warmth is a strong El Niño weather pattern, in which the ocean releases immense amounts of heat into the atmosphere. But temperatures are running so far ahead of those during the last strong El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, that scientists said the records would not be occurring without an underlying trend caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.

Past patterns suggest that El Niño will send unusual amounts of rain and snow to the American Southwest and to California, offering some relief for that parched state but also precipitating floods and mudslides. The California effects are not a certainty, experts said, but if they come, they are likely to be strongest in the latter part of the winter.

Forecasters have been issuing warnings about a strong El Niño. The coming few months will test whether governments, and the global relief agencies that support poor countries, have prepared, particularly to provide food relief for hard-hit regions.

Though worldwide in its consequences, El Niño originates in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, when normal weather patterns shift in a way that allows the ocean to release large amounts of stored-up heat into the atmosphere. That perturbs atmospheric waves that can travel thousands of miles, redistributing heat and moisture around the globe.

The effects can be profound, with some research even suggesting that civil wars become more likely in tropical countries when they are under stress from an El Niño.

Scientists have long wondered whether human-induced global warming would alter the frequency or severity of El Niños, but so far, that does not seem to be the case. “We have no reason at this point to think that El Niño itself is responding to the forcing from greenhouse gases,” Dr. Seager said. “You can think of them as independent and adding to each other.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/s..._th_20151022&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=50329110

Conflating cause and effect of El Niño with CO2 producing more severe weather, civil wars, hotter weather but uncertainty of these events in particular to California.

Claim anything and everything is the result of CO2, even the uncertainty, goes way past science into hyperbole right into ridiculous.

The shrill cry of global warming has to be discounted. Predictions often do not confirm reality. Hence, uncertainty is caused by CO2. That is too funny.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

NOAA Massively Ramps Up Their Temperature Fraud Ahead Of Paris

As of last year, NOAA didn’t show much, if any August warming for almost 20 years.

That didn’t suit Barack Obama’s agenda, so they simply changed the data to make the hiatus disappear.

This is on top of the massive data tampering they did prior to 2014.

Their graph looks nothing like satellite measurements of global temperature.

https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com...ps-up-their-temperature-fraud-ahead-of-paris/


Interesting that many people are watching the NOAA site, capturing data and graphs, saving them and analyzing past history for consistency. Strange that NOAA has no control over the satellite data but they are the keeper of record for surface data. Why is there such a large difference between satellite data and surface data?

 

[Randolph Kinney]

A new study finds that satellites may be underestimating the warming of the lower atmosphere

An alternative technique is to use satellites to extract temperatures from radiative emission at microwave frequencies from oxygen in the atmosphere. Satellites can cover the entire globe and thereby avoid the problem with discrete sensors. However, satellites also change over time, their orbit can change, or their detection devices can also change.

Another issue with satellites is that the measurements are made throughout the atmosphere that can contain contaminants to corrupt the measurement. For instance, it is possible that water droplets (either in clouds or precipitation) can influence the temperature readings.

So, it is clear that there are strengths and weaknesses to any temperature measurement method. You would hope that either method would tell a similar story, and they do to some extent, but there are key differences. Basically, the lower atmosphere (troposphere) is heating slower than the Earth surface.

In fact, for the time period 1987–2006, the temperatures among the four groups that collect satellite data ranges from 0.086°C per decade to 0.22°C per decade. In more recent years, the trend is much reduced, and for two of the leading satellite groups (University of Alabama at Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems), temperatures are basically flat.

The recent flatness in satellite temperatures as surface temperatures continue to rise has presented a quandary for scientists. Are both results real? Is there some reason they diverge? Is one measurement more accurate than the other? This is one of the areas of very active research.

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...tudy-disputes-satellite-temperature-estimates

What the public (Pete) does not know, won't hurt them. It serves to motivate them to panic and become "chicken little" screaming global warming caused by man burning carbon. Who knew of such recent divergence of surface temperature data versus satellite data?

 

[Randolph Kinney]

NOAA CAUGHT REWRITING US TEMPERATURE HISTORY (AGAIN)

We have written a number of times about how government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration here in the U.S., have systematically adjusted temperature history to make the past look colder. They apparently do this, usually surreptitiously and without explanation, in order to stoke global warming hysteria.

Their cooling of the past to keep the global warming meme alive reminds me of the old Soviet joke – the future is known, it is the past that keeps changing.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/noaa-caught-rewriting-us-temperature-history-again.php