The End Of Germany’s Energiewende?

Rex Tillerson Says Climate Science 'Inconclusive'

Brought to you by Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Forum

This winter could go down in history as the event that proved the German energy transition to be unsubstantiated and incapable of becoming a success story. Electricity from wind and solar generation has been catastrophically low for several weeks. December brought new declines. A persistent winter high-pressure system with dense fog throughout Central Europe has been sufficient to unmask the fairy tale of a successful energy transition, even for me as a lay person. You do not need to be a technician, an energy expert, or a scientist to perceive the underlying futility of this basic situation. Stable high-pressure winter weather has resulted in a confrontation. An Energiewende that relies mainly on wind and solar energy will not work in the long run. One cannot forgo nuclear power, eliminate fossil fuels, and tell people that electricity supplies will remain secure all the same.--Heiner Fassbeck, Energy Post, 10 January 2017

Germany’s Federal  Ministry of Economics has commissioned an expert report about this very question: Should consumers pay a fixed amount for renewable energy subsidies from 2021? No matter how much electricity a household or company consumes, a fixed licence fee per year would have to be paid. To date, green energy subsidies are based on electricity consumption per kilowatt hour. The new system would mean that typical households with low power consumption, i.e. single and low-income earners, would primarily shoulder the burden. --Bizz Energy, 8 January 2017

During questioning at the Senate on Wednesday, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, President-elect Trump's choice to be secretary of state, answered a question from Sen. Jeff Merkley on climate change by stating that research on the subject is "inconclusive." Tillerson also said that he does not see it as "the imminent national security threat other people do." --Yahoo News, 11 January 2017

About three months after the beginning of the Clinton administration, Hazel O’Leary called me into her office to ask, “What have you done to Al Gore? I am told I have to fire you.” Although Secretary O’Leary offered to find a way to keep me at DOE as a civil servant, I was glad to have an excuse to get back to doing real science at Princeton University, which was kind enough to offer me a professorship again. Watching the evening news, I would often be outraged by the distortions about CO₂ and climate that were being intoned by hapless, scientifically-illiterate newscasters. My wife Barbara, who patiently sat through my outbursts, finally said, “Why don’t you speak up?” At Barbara’s urging, I began to speak up and I have never stopped. --The Best Schools, 8 January 2017

Sometime in the mid-2020s, U.S. energy officials project, two key lines measuring energy imports and exports will cross, and the United States will have achieved something quite special – the advent of an era in which America is a net energy exporter.  That’s one of the big projections contained in the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s newly released Annual Energy Outlook for 2017 (AEO2017). It’s largely the result of expected declining oil imports and rising natural gas exports. --Energy Tomorrow, 11 January 2017 

Fracking could give Britain a cheap and abundant source of home-produced energy and it would be “irresponsible to future generations” to ignore its potential benefits, according to the climate change minister. Mr Hurd said: “I look at shale gas through the lens of energy security. We import a lot of gas. If we have got the capacity to generate our own gas in the country and we can do it cost effectively while reassuring people about the impact on the environment, I think it would be irresponsible to future generations not to answer the question ‘can we do it?’ --Ben Webster, The Times, 11 January 2017 

California Is Singing In The Rain, Climate Alarmists Make Fools Of Themselves

Heavy Rain And Snow End California’s 5-Year Drought

The recent onslaught of rain and snow finally brought much-needed relief to northern California, ending a punishing five-year drought, federal officials said Thursday. Stations up and down the Sierra mountain chain reported twice the amount of normal rain and snow for this time of year after snowstorms doubled the vital snowpack there that provides the state with much of its year-round water supply. However, much of southern California remains dry, though most not at the most severe level of drought. Only 2% of the state is in that category of “exceptional” drought: an area that stretches from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. --USA Today, 13 January 2017 

source: NOAA

 

The recent drought in California has also been repeatedly linked to man-made climate change, although as other researchers have pointed out, since current conditions in that state don’t appear to be part of a long-term trend it is hard to see the logic in the claims. Making claims about current droughts is fraught with difficulty for environmentalists, because of the likelihood that a return to wetter conditions will leave them looking foolish. --Andrew Montford, Global Warming Policy Forum, 13 January 2017

The graphic shows that the current drought in California is not exceptional by any stretch of the imagination. We know that rainfall levels in recent years, though low, are not unprecedented as far as the 20^th Century is concerned. But, of course, one factor in determining the severity of drought is temperature. To put recent temperatures into historical context, it is worth revisiting the work of V C La Marche & V Markgraf, both experts on past climate. Their data shows just how much higher the Californian tree line was in the Middle Ages, and before, and therefore how much higher temperatures were. The reality is that California has been hotter and drier for much of its recent history. --Paul Homewood, Not A Lot of People Know That, 16 September 2015

California was stuck in a deep drought during Gov. Jerry Brown’s first term, much like the one the state is currently going through. The only difference is that global cooling, not warming, was blamed for causing drought in the late 1970s. In 1976, the New York Times reported that California was “so dry, brush fires have started several weeks early” and that “water is being rationed.” The Times reported that climatologists “believe that the climate has moved into a cooling cycle, which means highly erratic weather for decades to come.” California’s Gov. Brown, who is serving out his fourth term, is once again presiding over a state mired in drought. Brown hasn’t changed his mind much since then. This time though, he’s worried that global warming could deplete California’s water supplies. --Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 4 May 2015

The ink was hardly dry on the Secretarial Order from Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell blaming California’s drought on global warming that rain and snow swept across the state. San Francisco International Airport was forced to cancel flights and there were blizzard warnings for Lake Tahoe. After years of predicting that California’s future would be a barren desert, the predictions have been slightly revised. California is now doomed to alternate between droughts and storms. And if it rains cats and dogs over Death Valley, we will be told that Global Warming causes canine and feline precipitation and that unless we agree to give Al Gore more money, we’re doomed to be brained by falling felines. --Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine, 12 January 2017