GlobalWarming.org

The Sheboygan (Wis.) Press, in an editorial: "Much of the debate this Earth Day centers on whether global warming is real or not. Many scientists … maintain that man is causing the atmosphere to heat up, mainly through the burning of fossil fuels  — coal for power plants and gasoline in cars and trucks. … Other scientists … say the earth is merely going through a normal cycle. …

From IceCap.us

You’d think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month.

Here is what you see in visible light:

Here is what the infrared camera sees:

Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C

This station will be rated a CRN5 by this definition from the NOAA Climate Reference Network handbook, section 2.2.1:

Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”

Now a caveat: There had just been a light rain, and skies had been overcast, it had just started to clear and you can see some light shadows in the visible image. Had this rainfall and overcast not occurred, the differences between grass and concrete temperatures would likely be greater. Unfortunately I was unable to wait around for full sun conditions. The air temperature was 58°F (14.4°C) according to my thermometer at the time.

Here is another view which shows the NOAA sensor array, the sky, and the evidence of recent rainfall as evidenced by the wet parking lot:

Why NOAA allows installations like this I’ll never understand. And this station is a USHCN climate station of record, used in who knows how many climate studies.

I’ll tell you more on this station and others I surveyed tomorrow.

I see that Henry Derwint, President and CEO, International Emissions Trading Association in Geneva, Switzerland is scheduled to testify at Thursday’s hearing by the Senate Finance Committee on “Tax Aspects of a Cap-and-Trade System”. It took me a moment, as it seems he switched jobs, but now I recall my exposure to Mr. Derwint’s work in Europe. It is highly relevant to the testimony he is going to give tomorrow.

As I relate in my new book, or at least in the manuscript sent off – which, I regret, was much bigger than stood any realistic chance of making it through, with there certainly being no shortage of material – then-Chancellor of the Exchequer official Derwint traveled around Europe in 2006 selling a post-2012 cap-and-trade plan to Member States understandably wary of taking on a deeper promise.

After all, as we have serially established in these pages, Europe’s emissions have continued to steadily climb since Europe agreed to Kyoto in 1997, something which the “first” Kyoto cap-and-trade plan, their Emissions Trading Scheme, did absolutely nothing to arrest. Despite what you may hear tomorrow.

When Mr. Derwint arrived in Madrid, in between meeting with Ministries of the Environment and Economy, he asked to meet with a colleague of mine not affiliated with any governmental office (outside of his professorship at a local university), but who had been vocal in opposing the rationing plan. Fearing a realistic reassessment by Spain, Mr. Derwint indicated that he came bearing “temporary exemptions for energy-intensive industries” in order to gain Spain’s agreement for a deeper “Round II” promise. The key word for Spain here is “temporary”. The key message for us is that the ETS chases jobs away. Spain knows this, their Acerinox having graced us with new steel jobs in Carroll County, KY (its North American Stainless subsidiary).

Derwint, I was informed in an amazed phone call after the meeting broke up, also indicated a willingness to plead on behalf of Spain in the (ongoing, as we’ve reported) talks about new quotas. He expressed a willingness to assert that their “first” obligation represented a raw deal; that of course was a “reduction” promise not to exceed a 15% increase over 1990 levels. A Polish minister with whom I subsequently met informed me that the same crew, led by Mr. Derwint, also paid them a visit and the exchange was such that my hosts inquired if I had an explanation for why the UK emissaries “had the zeal of missionaries” and were so much more heavy-handed than even Brussels. I didn’t, and still don’t.

There was more, but let’s see what made it into the book. All of this is to say that Mr. Derwint’s sunny message of hope and change tomorrow does tend to fly in the face of his past efforts revealing a thorough understanding of the ETS’s impacts. Possibly he can explain why, if ETS is such a success, Europe increasingly threatens us with trade wars should we refuse to do it to ourselves, too, because they can’t take the hit to their competitiveness much longer. Just a thought.

As food prices soars to new heights, researchers at Texas A&M makes a potentially revolutionary discovery. They discover a plant gene for saline tolerance in Arabidopsis. Arabidopsis is the trusty old model organism for plant scientists, and this discovery will help us produce new plants using molecular plant breeding methods (PMB’s), if the environmentalists will let us.

Although some of our current ailments are based on ill conceived ethanol mandates, subsidies that skew the food markets, and increased consumption in India and China, a recent op ed in the Telegraph joins a more and more unified Brittish demand for adopting PMB’s. The op ed also points the finger in the direction of OPEC, and the hypocrisy of leaders like Hugo Chavez. Chavez is supposedly a champion of the poor, but the high oil prices caused by the cartel’s price fixing are part of the problem with the rise in the cost of food.

Parts of the Arab world are harvesting the riches from the price fixing, it is important to remember that not all countries in the Arab world have oil. The region is balancing on a precarious edge between civil unrest and political chaos by choosing either of the options available to alleviate the situation.

Zimbabwe is again looking at starvation, not only due to the food prices, but also due to new bouts of drought. Last time they faced this situation, about 6 years ago, the government in Zimbabwe refused to accept aid shipments of maize because the grains came from PMB’s. This is the same corn that Americans eat every day. Luckily the starving population would not stand for this decision, spurred on by jet-setting environmental activists from Europe and USA. They raided the food containers, so the grain eventually got the people it was intended for, but what will the misguided leaders in Zimbabwe do this time around?

On the good news side, Ethopia opened up its first commodity exchange last week, which will lower the transaction cost for several major commodities in the country. Hopefully that will help Ethiopian farmers and consumers with lower cost for important foodstuffs.

Yesterday, a listener on the Michael Medved show challenged me that (I paraphrase), "Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost."

I said that I was no expert on Denmark but that there were significant subsidies involved. As this Economist article makes clear, it is certainly not correct to say that Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost:

Researchers in Denmark have gone a step further and put a value on this effect. They believe that wind power shaved 1 billion kroner ($167m) off Danish electricity bills in 2005. On the other hand, Danish consumers also paid 1.4 billion kroner in subsidies for wind power.

The Danish government cut wind power subsidies that year. The result:

The building of wind turbines has virtually ground to a halt since subsidies were cut back.

Meanwhile, compared with others in the European Union, Danes remain above-average emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. For all its wind turbines, a large proportion of the rest of Denmark's power is generated by plants that burn imported coal.

Moreover, because you cannot store any wind power that is generated when no-one wants to use it, Denmark has to sell excess wind-power to Sweden at a price of 0c per KWh. This has caused some trouble:

Much has been written about Denmark's success as the world's wind power pioneer. But the regularly repeated claim – that Denmark generates 20 percent of its electricity demand from wind sources – is highly misleading. That 20 percent of electricity is not supplied continuously from wind power. Denmark’s wind supply is so variable that it relies heavily on neighbors Norway and Sweden, taking their excess production.

In 2003 its export figure for wind power electricity production was as high as 84 percent, as Denmark found it could not absorb its own highly variable wind output capacity into its domestic system. The scale of Denmark’s subsidies was such that in 2006-07 the government increasingly came under scrutiny from the Danish media, which claimed the subsidies were out of control.

Overall, Denmark, a small, flat, windy country of about 5.5 million souls cannot be a model for the US to follow, even if they had succeeded in making wind power work efficiently.