Monthly Archives: October 2021

Impossible

It is a simple truth that some things are simply impossible no matter what some inspirational poster might say. You are not going roller skating on an active lava flow. And the idea that magically in a decade or two, we can convert the entire grid to electricity, all cars will be electric and there is no environmental cost to using lithium batteries to power the future.

10/15/2021 it was reported that anti-oil activists attempted to storm an Interior department office building. The stupidity of such would be obvious except that today, the brainwashing of the global warming fear mongers is historic and totally effective. The schools are teaching unscientific crap and any skeptic is banned or threatened with some sort of Orwellian gaslighting.

So consider this.  A modern home has a 200 amp service normally. Older homes may have only 100 amp service and I’ve seen many houses from the pre-air-conditioner days with only 50 amp.  A Tesla charging station requires 75 amp service by itself.

A subdivision of 20 houses, in theory, could “require” 4,000 amp supply. But as a practical matter the service does not expect all the houses to draw max current at the same time. So the whole subdivision transformers are geared to provide 200 amp to any one house and probably less than half that to the whole subdivision. Now add 20 to 30 E cars (most people have more than 1 car but say on average 1½ cars per household.)  So everyone plugs in their E car when they get home from work, pulling some 2,250 amps by themselves. Now add the heat or air, kitchen appliances, lights, etc. and you see the problem.  The wires will overheat, voltages will drop and transformers explode, houses will be set afire and people will die.

The pro-green activists have zero comprehension of the problem. They don’t understand that mining will be extensive to get the cobalt, nickel, copper, and lithium necessary for an E car, E storage battery, and E commerce world. What are they willing to give up?  Air-conditioning?  Do they think Phoenix will be livable without it?  How are you going to generate the electricity? Wind turbines and solar panels are inefficient. And solar and wind tend to drop out as evening falls and that is just the time for peak demand and peak demand will increase with each new E car recharging.

The only thing capable of generating enough electricity and to do so uniformly and cheaply is nuclear power. The same greenies who support electricity don’t want nuclear energy. They want some pie in the sky solution that cannot and will not happen. But perhaps that is what should and will take place. We simply allow the collapse of the entire economy and then see if the environmentalists are willing to live in unheated homes, and abandon asphalt roads, lawn mowers, rubber tired vehicles, and go back to horse and buggy or some electric scooter, on dirt roads and heat their home and cook their food with firewood and trash like they do in third world countries.

The climate alarmists conspiracy to globalize and control all climate discussion is heating up as pseudo-scientists claim to be able to see the future 80 years in advance.  Only an idiot would claim that a model – a hypothesis if you will – is “science”.  Science has to be falsifiable (Karl Popper) and testable. You cannot claim science based upon a speculation which no one can replicate, except with the identical formula in the identical computer.

The various claims are so fatuous as to be laughable but the public swallows it whole and in the process terrifies and brainwashes the young into believing they are doomed if oil and gas use is not reduced to zero.  They don’t realize the enormous amount of plastic used by a wind turbine. They don’t realize that the generators are made from copper and metals mined using heavy diesel operated equipment. They don’t realize that these turbines are inefficient, producing electricity for only a nominal period of time. This morning, for instance, the breeze here is almost dead calm. Zero electricity. It’s partly cloudy, making solar panels problematic.

We do not have the lithium, copper, nickel, nor cobalt required to build sufficient batteries for the conversion of all cars to electric use, not even if a transition of 20 years or more. And to obtain those minerals means we will need to mine pristine areas into vast wastelands that dwarf that of the open coal mines of the West.

Among the issues is the fact almost all the “climate models” use a method (Optimal Fingerprinting) to create these elegant and unprovable claims of sea level rise, temperature increases, increased storms, etc.  Now comes someone who actually took the time to delve into the math of optimal fingerprinting and discovered it is a badly flawed process, largely leading to meaningless results.  Never mind. It will be used time and again for the next few decades to support wild-eyed conclusions about the imminent doom of the planet.

by Ross McKitrick

One day after the IPCC released the AR6 I published a paper in Climate Dynamics showing that their “Optimal Fingerprinting” methodology on which they have long relied for attributing climate change to greenhouse gases is seriously flawed and its results are unreliable and largely meaningless. Some of the errors would be obvious to anyone trained in regression analysis, and the fact that they went unnoticed for 20 years despite the method being so heavily used does not reflect well on climatology as an empirical discipline.

“After the marquee outdoor clothing firm The North Face refused to make logoed jackets for an oil and gas firm, the president of that company thanked them… for basing their entire business on petroleum products. Though perhaps they’re now The Red Face since apparently they had no idea where polyester and other synthetic fibers come from. Perhaps they thought there were Gore-tex trees in the rainforest. Just because you say you love nature doesn’t mean you know anything about it.  “Environmentalists” exemplified by the likes of the North Face are so ignorant of the very materials they wear that they have no business saying anything to anyone about the climate they are so ignorant of. (quoted)”