Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
There was a thunderstorm [Thursday] night. The 6:00 a.m. news [Friday] morning was comical. The Anchor ponderously intoned there was a storm last night and sent us to the Weatherman, who pointed to radar weather map as he told us the storm had left our area, then we cut to a pretty young woman standing in the rain on the side of a road as cars drove around a puddle, who breathlessly explained that the storm left standing water on some roadways.
20 years ago, the Anchor would have said “Well, that was some rain last night, a real gully washer. In sports, our Minnesota Twins will host the . . .” and that would have been the end of it.
This may explain the media penchant for going along with the global warming hype. 20 years ago the weather was just a section of the newscast. Now it’s become huge business, with it’s own teams, trucks, radar installations, even it’s own networks and network feeds that the locals contract from. So the weather forecasting industry has a vested interest in making everything spectacular, dangerous, dazzling, tittilating. Follow The Money – global warming is a natural fit for the whole expansion of the weather forecast industry.
Joe Doakes
Following the career of former Channel-11, current (I think) Channel 4 weatherman Paul Douglas is illustrative, as it’s pretty well tracked the growth of “Weatherman As Celebrity”.
In the eighties and nineties, Douglas’ side-line business – building weather-presentation software for broadast – was part and parcel of the growth of the Weather as Entertainment part of today’s newscasts; it brought action, zooming clouds, interaction between radar, maps and the presenter that made the weathercast seem like a little movie production of its own. It made Douglas pretty wealthy, I’m told – nothing wrong with that – and helped him become the Twin Cities’ first weather “celebrity”.
And he was one of the first to board the Global Warming train.
I dunno…, I think I’d have to vote for Barry ZeVan as the first weather celebrity, without the techno-gee-whiz.
I don’t know about Douglas, but meteorologists are notorious for NOT getting on board the AGW train. A few years ago, some leftist groups started pushing for a certification program for meteorologists. If they denied AGW, no certification, no paycheck.
This is the problem with apocalyptic world views. If people’s disbelief in the notion that AGW will DESTROY ALL LIFE ON THE PLANET, you are justified in doing anything to them.
A) China and India’s growth 100% negates anything we do about supposed AGW. B) The actual required actions aren’t going to be taken by either party. Tons of thorium pebble reactors, switching all fleet vehicles to natural gas, massive mining efforts for solar power and batteries, zero wind turbines, zero corn ethanol, etc.
Plus the entitlement bomb requires growth, which you are only going to get via fossil fuels.
Agenda 21 = doom.
We are ruled by idiots.
You are correct in every regard, TheFedSucks. The green agenda is poverty and stagnation. You cannot make up for a lack of growth by redistribution of wealth.
In a slow growth/no growth economy, existing wealth will slowly make its way upwards from the poor to the better off. This should be incredibly obvious; even the commies knew it. That’s why they pushed for a radical revolution in social structure — the elimination of class altogether.
That didn’t work out very well.
Douglas got dropped from wcco-4 a few years back because he wanted more money than Don Shelby. He currently is the go to weather source for the Strib and occasionally MPR
The TV weather is a desperate attempt to stay relevant and important. With the technology in our pockets right now we’re not tied to the TV for news or event images. With a couple of twitches of the thumb we can get moving radar imagery, forecasts and nearly up-to-the minute status reports. Good for us, not so good for the TV stations that have dropped millions of Doppler-dollars into being the go-to font of weather-info – and needs our eyeballs in order to attract the advertising to continue paying for it. If you think weather reporting has become more dramatic, there’s the reason.
If Douglas – or as a KFAN on-air personality describes him, “The Goof on the Roof” – were an energy company, someone might question whether his Global Warmening Prognostications as simply being “good for his business”. The fact that climate changes is a fact. Has been since the glacier that formed the valley I live in existed. Good thing it warmed up since then, eh?
Rikkor, I remember Barry ZeVan wearing an all-blue at KSTP suit on purpose right after the invention of chromakey technology. He walked in front of his national map and disappeared except for his head and his hands. Classic moment.
err … “All blue suit at KSTP.” More coffee needed.
Several years ago (1999-2000), I worked for a company called “Kavouras”. They made weather computer graphics computer systems. Channel 17 weather? (don’t know if it still exists or not, it’s been years since I turned it on and we went Netflix only last summer) That was Kavouras. Ch 11 Weather where Belinda stands up in front of the national maps and shows the radar and weather patterns? That’s Kavouras. LOTS of meterologists on staff there. Numerous people I talked to there thought that Dave Dahl was the best weatherman of the big 3 back then (Mike Fairbourne – 4, Dave Dahl – 5, Ken Barlowe – 11). Dave Dahl is the only weatherman from our area who I’ve heard is openly skeptical of MMGW. Of course, I haven’t watched local news for many years so I don’t know anything about the new crowd.
It shouldn’t be any surprise the weather dept has followed the news division and evolved into “infotainment”.
Mr. Douglas being the clever capitalist that he is, has found a way to monetize his services. He licenses his imaging software to the forecasting industry as well as providing custom forecasts to the agricultural and financial communities. A very successful entrepreneur (job creator) by any measure.
@ TheFedSucks,
I think you’ve hit upon the problem without noticing. Our rate of consumption has risen as we’ve entered middle age and beyond. What do we consume when we consume? We consume products created from a few raw materials and a lot of energy. Even folks with their green hobby, are likely consuming products which required a great deal of energy to produce, even if their electricity bill is low. The CO2 consumed to support our lifestyle goes far beyond our gasoline bill and our electric bill. It is extremely difficult to engage in any form of consumption without buying products produced with coal-fired electricity, diesel and gasoline for transport, and all the energy of all of the employees who made those products for you. Does that mean their efforts to go green are quixotic? Yeah, pretty much.
Renewable energy firms will learn, just as internet firms eventually learned, there needs to be a compelling economic case for your customers to buy your product. A political case is not sufficient; politics changes too fast, and is too capricious. Payback periods from investments in politics should be no more than 6 months. Renewable energy is still a political play, not a economic play.
What is needed has not changed. Policies which move us away from using coal as a source for electricity, and decreasing the rate of carbon generation per ton-mile of transport, remain the primary goals. Fortunately the need to reduce air pollutants and the high price of oil provide drivers to push us in that direction irrespective of climate change, but it is not enough.
Climate change is a long term problem and needs a long term solution. First and foremost, we need a long-standing commitment into research into low-carbon energy. Second, we need a price on carbon emissions which can be predicted well into the future. Cap and trade produces a wildly varying carbon price as energy use from carbon sources is elastic only in the long run. That wildly varying carbon price makes it impossible to justify the sort of long term investment required to install low-carbon energy sources. In contrast, even a very small, but permanent, carbon tax is something that CFOs can bank on when doing their calculations. A constant carbon tax that gradually rises over time stimulates investment, more so than a wildly varying carbon price from cap and trade, even if that price is on average higher.
Emery: TL;DR. It’s not your blog.
I believe in climate change. In my half a century I remember no time in which climate was a constant. And I would assume that there are records that would show evidence of climatic fluctuations for longer ago than that.
Emery, the Dept. of energy keeps a lot of data on where US energy has come from for the last half century.
Renewable energy, nuclear energy, hydro energy, coal, diesel, and lNG power generation all show typical exponential growth curves. All are mature technologies. They are all on the flat part of the curve. There will be no burst of growth in wind, or solar, or bio-diesel, without a quantum leap in technology.
The numbers are quite sobering. Even with all the subsidies, the greatest decrease in greenhouse gas emissions in the US does not come from switching from coal, diesel, or gas to ‘green’ energy, it comes from switching coal and diesel fired power plants to LNG. Fracking has done more for the environment than all the wishfull thinking about solar and wind power.
This is a good place to start.
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/index.cfm#summary
The only way an analogy between green energy and the internet would work is if, after forty years of politicians pouring billions into their croneys’ pockets, we still had 9600 baud modems, and paid a thousand bucks a month for the connection.
“Renewable energy is still a political play, not a economic play.” Perhaps you may have missed that particular sentence.
As one Saudi oil minister put it, “The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone, and the Oil Age won’t end because we run out of oil.” We won’t run out of coal, or oil, or gas. Natural gas, by the way, is essential in the short term to allow us to shut down coal plants, and in the long term to provide load balancing for intermittent renewable sources of power. We will not manage our climate change problems without cheap fracked natural gas, so embrace the technology and encourage its improvement.
Tackling climate change is a much more difficult and long term task.
Sorry if I misunderstood you, Emery. I have kind of a chip on my shoulder about this.
I researched gross US electricity production by source for a project a few years ago — well I guess it was ten years ago — and I was astonished to discover how poor the economic argument for renewable fuels is. Economies of scale don’t work. The cost curve goes up higher and faster than the revenue curve, and they only cross if you make predictions about energy use that have never been true in the past. Solar and wind work in a few, local scenarios. Otherwise investment in solar and wind is a drain on the economy because the money could have been invested in something with a proven return.
Emery- “Climate change is a long term problem and needs a long term solution”. Thanks for all the proof. Why don’t you go to: powerlineblog.com for Jun. 23rd and read “Global warming in a few slides” to find out why climate change is not a problem.
Yes, the sun provides more than enough energy for our electric needs every day. The problem is it is diffuse. Hydro power is efficient because it can be stored, yes, but more importantly by channeling rain into rivers gravity and geography has concentrated a great deal of potential energy in one place where we can capture it. Millions of years ago, swamps full of organic material died and were converted to petroleum, nicely squeezed into compact and energy dense hydrocarbon molecules stored underground. Thank you ancient food web and geological processes for concentrating that energy. Nuclear power is a dense source, but only after you’ve concentrated the U-235 into fuel rods.
In contrast, while there is an enormous amount of radiative energy from the sun hitting the earth at any moment, the amount hitting each square meter is very small. There is an enormous amount of energy in the wind, but there is a very small amount hitting a given windmill. Directly harvesting wind and solar energy will always be hard because it is too diffuse. Storage is also a problem, but harvesting energy from a diffuse source will always be the hardest problem to overcome. Entropy is the enemy of renewable power, and entropy always wins (2nd law of Thermodynamics).
“If CO2 were a problem the cost of stopping it today would be 50 times the cost of adapting to it the day after tomorrow”. Lord Monckton
jimf: Lord Monckton you say? Does this gentleman come with only titled credentials? Perhaps a degree in anything remotely scientific in nature?
“Climate change is a long term problem that needs a long term solution”. Emery, yourself you say? Do you come with a degree in anything remotely to do with climate science? But I see you’re bravely ignoring the powerline link that, as you say, does come from a gentleman that has more than titled credentials and a degree that is very much “scientific in nature.” Nice dodge, though.
The big problem with Hydro is that its marginal utility isn’t good. We’ve done all of the easy hydro stuff. It has a hard upper limit. Minnesota will never be a great hydro power producer. It has lots of rivers, but it’s too flat.
Current theory on the origin of petroleum is that it’s derived from the remains of algae that once lived in warm, shallow seas. They really don’t know for sure where it came from. But if you tell that to a greenie they’ll think your crazy.
They think that science knows everything.
@jimf;
Chemical Engineer with several technical degrees.
@Terry,
I tell my green friends to learn some science. I say that prior to explaining Nuclear reactors provide base load power, that is, steady, reliable power with low marginal cost (and high capital cost). Wind and solar provide intermittent power that depends on the weather. If you’re going to base more than 10% of your power in wind and solar you need to build standby power to replace it when the weather doesn’t cooperate. So while they campaign for renewable power and plans to install wind farms and solar farms, they need to remember to build matching natural gas plants which will sit idle 70% of the time and produce greenhouse gases the other 30%.
Emery- A chemical engineer? Then by your “logic”, you have about as much standing to comment on global warming as Monckton does. But yet you do. From the powerline link- Dr. John Christy, University of Alabama. Alabama State Climatologist.
In economic terms, Emery, when calculating the cost of solar or wind power you have to include the cost of dealing with its intermittent nature. If solar or wind was throw-away cheap, you could store its power by pumping water into a hydroelectric reservoir. It scales horribly. If you get 100MW by covering a square mile of desert with collectors, you must cover 2 square miles with collectors to generate 200MW.
The existing power grid was built at the lowest cost possible. The scalability of fossil fuel power plants was assumed. If you want to move the power plants from where they are — close to the power consumption point to save transmission costs — you have to rebuild infrastructure.
Good God it’s expensive, and eventually the consumer pays the price for it, through higher prices for power or higher taxes.
Good point jimf,
Emery is a deep believer in the gatekeeper argument i.e.that only those properly credentialed persons can be heard ( sort of like being invisible to the judge if you aren’t wearing your peruke in a Brit courtroom) so most definitely Emery’s opinion as a chemical engineer has no more validity than Lord Monckton with his advanced journalism degree since they both FAIL the gatekeepers test of not being properly credentialed as climate scientists.
Yes, the climate is changing, as it always has changed throughout recorded history. But mankind isn’t causing the change and can’t stop it. Anybody who seeks enough political power to try is a tyrant-wanna-be. Anybody who supports him is a lackey. Both are enemies of free people everywhere.
@kel/jimf
Believing the center line predictions of IPCC (rather than the worst case scenarios) was always sufficient to argue for action on climate change. Simple extrapolation of temperature data includes too many factors unrelated to greenhouse gases (e.g. sunspot cycles) which caused plateaus and even falling temperatures for a decade or more in the midst of a long upward trend. Policies which move us away from using coal as a source for electricity, and decreasing the rate of carbon generation remain primary goals.
“Believing the center line predictions of IPCC (rather than the worst case scenarios) was always sufficient “
Sorry Emery, using your logic “the gatekeeper argument” you have no standing to to make that assertion and sadly neither do most of the members of the IPCC who are administrators and bureaucrats by trade, not scientists.
The centerline was chosen for political reasons, Emery.
The IPCC is a political committee, not a scientific committee.
Climate science is a well-established field of science. It is decades old, highly scrutinized and comprises many thousands of individuals in hundreds of organizations with a wide variety of backgrounds. The broad consensus in that field is that our CO2 emissions are warming the planet.
Although I do tend to agree with Terry’s earlier post about bad climate policies, such as backing renewable energy with no thought for the cost, or insisting on biofuels despite the damage they do, are bad whatever the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases. Good policies-strategies for adapting to higher sea levels and changing weather patterns, investment in agricultural resilience, research into fossil-fuel-free ways of generating and storing energy—are wise precautions even in a world where sensitivity is low. So is putting a price on carbon and ensuring that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come.
What it comes down to is if the Republican party doesn’t come into power with a massive integrated, dynamic monetary / energy / entitlement plan we are all screwed.
Now excuse me while I walk down to the boathouse and fill the boat up with 60 gallons of fossil fuel. I expect the kids and their friends to burn it while wake-boarding today. ;^)
Emery said:
“The broad consensus in that field is that our CO2 emissions are warming the planet.”
“consensus”: how fools think science is “done”.
At one time there was a broad, scientific consensus that unchecked reproduction by the mentally unfit and socially troublesome was dooming America.
I call it hysteria rather than fraud. Imagine if scientists told us that, a century from, an asteroid big enough to cause an extinction event was going to collide with the Earth. And politicians told us that the only way to stop this was to allow them to manage every aspect of the economy, down to how many of your kids it was acceptable for you to send to college.
And the asteroid couldn’t be seen, it was proved statistically.
It has to do with Bayesian probability.
Bayesian probability basically says that “probability” is, to some degree, subjective. It’s your best guess for how likely something is. But to be Bayesian, your “best guess” must take the observable evidence into account. Updating your beliefs by looking at the outside world is called “Bayesian inference”. Your initial guess about the probability is called your “prior belief”, or just your “prior” for short. Your final guess, after you look at the evidence, is called your “posterior.” The observable evidence is what changes your prior into your posterior.
How much does the evidence change your belief? That depends on three things. It depends on A) how different the evidence is from your prior, B) how strong the evidence is, and C) how strong your prior is.
What does it mean for a prior to be “strong”? It means you really, really believe something to be true. If your start off with a very strong prior, even solid evidence to the contrary won’t change your mind. In other words, your posterior will come directly from your prior. (And where do priors come from? On this, Bayesian theory is silent. Let’s assume they come directly from your…um…posterior.)
There are many people who have very strong priors about things. For example, there are people who believe, very strongly, (for example) solar power will never be cost-efficient. If you confront them with evidence of solar’s rapid price declines, they will continue to insist that, despite this evidence, solar will simply never be cost-competitive with fossil fuels. That they continue to insist this does not necessarily make them irrational in the Bayesian sense; they simply have very strong priors. Someday they may be convinced – for example, if and when unsubsidized solar power starts being adopted on a mass scale. It’ll just take a LOT to convince them.
But here’s the thing: When those people keep broadcasting their priors to the world again and again after every new piece of evidence comes out, it gets very annoying. After every article comes out about a new solar technology breakthrough, or a new cost drop, they’ll just repeat “Solar will never be cost-competitive.” That is unhelpful and uninformative, since they’re just restating their priors over and over. Thus, it is annoying. Guys, we know what you think already.
English has no word for “the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors”. Yet it is a well-known phenomenon in the world of punditry, debate, and public affairs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_probability
I think the shorter Emery is “It is difficult, sometimes, to determine how much past experience tells us about future events”. To the arch-progressive, it tells us nothing about future events. To the arch-conservative, it tells us everything.
Most people’s beliefs are somewhere in between.
In politics, people tend to focus on those elements where it is not obvious which belief is true — whether, for example, solar power will become cheaper than fossil fuel power in a decade. We are not talking about predicting an eclipse, here.
The market is not rational, but it may help clarify things. I wonder if a fellow who owned a nice piece of land on one of the barrier islands off of NC would give me a good buy option for 2040? Doesn’t science say that it will be underwater or wracked by constant storms and hurricanes by then?
From my personal experience, purchasing lake-shore has worked very well for our family. I do so with the understanding that: “they don’t make lake-shore any more”.