Month: January 2013

I’m not anti-human. I’m pro animation.

Videos from the National Snow and Ice Data Center make clear (again) just how bogus this denial talking point is.

You can also show them my own video on the subject, below, if they haven’t seen it…

Continue reading “Next Time Someone Tells you “Antarctic Sea Ice is Growing”, Show them These..”

NY Times:

WASHINGTON — One of Shell Oil’s two Arctic drilling rigs is beached on an island in the Gulf of Alaska, threatening environmental damage from a fuel spill and calling into question Shell’s plans to resume drilling in the treacherous waters north of Alaska in the summer.

The rig, the Kulluk, broke free from a tow ship in stormy seas and ran aground Monday night. The Coast Guard was leading an effort to keep its more than 150,000 gallons of diesel fuel and lubricants from spilling onto the rocky shoreline.

At a news conference in Anchorage on Tuesday afternoon, Capt. Paul Mehler III, the federal on-scene coordinator, said that a reconnaissance flight showed the Kulluk was upright and stable, with no significant motion.

“The results are showing us that the Kulluk is sound,” Captain Mehler said. “No sign of breach of hull, no sign of release of any product.” He said the response team hoped to get salvage experts aboard the ship to get a better picture of damage.

Continue reading “Arctic Increasingly Open for Drilling. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”

If the climate deniers don’t give a flying fig about people who are freezing right now in New York and New Jersey, why do you think they’d give a damn about their grandchildren, or yours?

Above, Rep. Peter King has a lucid moment.

Talking Points Memo:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) on Wednesday said House Speaker John Boehner and congressional Republicans are to blame for the “continued suffering” after superstorm Sandy.

“This is not a Republican or Democratic issue,” Christie said during a press conference in Trenton. “National disasters happen in red states and blue states and states with Democratic governors and Republican governors. We respond to innocent victims of natural disasters not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans. Or at least we did until last night.”

“This was the Speaker’s decision — his alone,” Christie said.

Christie also added that the supplemental funds, amounting to some $60 billion already passed by the Senate, “just could not overcome the toxic internal politics of the House majority.”

Great quick recap on a roller coaster year from Paul Douglas of Weather Nation .

As I’ve noted recently, so-called conservatives have been waging a rabidly aggressive fight against any government subsidies to clean energy, while continuing to pump out far greater taxpayer support for sunsetting technologies and conventional fossil fuels. The one year extension of the wind production tax credit is better than nothing, but continues the long term tradition of hit and miss support for renewables, especially wind power, which has been allowed periodically to fall off its own fiscal cliff.

The Hill:

A one-year extension to a wind power credit made it into the final “fiscal cliff” bargain Tuesday, much to the delight of green groups and the wind industry.

The 2.2 cent-per-kilowatt-hour credit for wind-power production had already expired Tuesday. Green and industry groups had pushed hard for its extension, saying letting the credit end would eliminate 37,000 jobs.

“[W]e thank President Obama and all the members of the House and Senate who had the foresight to extend this successful policy, so wind projects can continue to be developed in 2013 and 2014,” Denise Bode, the departing chief executive of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), a wind industry group, said in a Tuesday statement.

Its inclusion marks a defeat for conservative groups and lawmakers, who argued an alteration to the credit amounted to an expansion of the program.

The fiscal-cliff bill headed to Obama’s desk extends a handful of income tax rates and punts a series of automatic spending cuts for another two months.

Continue reading “Wind Tax Credit Extended as Part of Fiscal Cliff Deal”

The Kochtopus media machine has made sure that the misfires of a burgeoning new industry, Solar energy, have become household names. Solyndra is the best example of non-scandals that Fox & Friends have tried hard to pump into something substantial.

Meanwhile, backed by a loan guarantee 15 times as large as the one Solyndra got, the new Vogtle Nuclear project has been quietly plowing ahead in Georgia.  Inevitably, the same types of tiresome and monotonous glitches, snafus and gremlins so familiar to nuclear industry observers have been cropping up and bogging down the ill considered project.

Those still looking for a nuclear revival would do well to consider what those of us paying attention knew a long time ago. This stuff is just too damn complex, ponderous, and expensive to compete. But don’t expect to hear much about it on Fox & Friends.

Wall Street Journal:

The first newly licensed nuclear-power plant to be built in the U.S. in decades, the Vogtle project in Georgia, has run into construction problems and may be falling years behind schedule, according to an engineering expert advising the state.

The $14 billion plant is being closely watched by energy experts as a bellwether for the rebirth of the U.S. nuclear industry, because it involves a new type of nuclear reactor and a modular construction method that are supposed to reduce construction time and cost.

But a construction monitor warned in a report to the Georgia Public Service Commission this month that the plant, which will be operated by Southern Co. SO -1.21% on behalf of several utilities, was falling behind schedule because of what he called an unsatisfactory performance by its construction team.

The expert hired to monitor the project, Bill Jacobs of engineering consultancy GDS Associates Inc., advised the regulators to brace for a potentially costly delay of two to four years. The two-reactor plant was initially scheduled to put its first reactor into service in 2016 but now expects that to happen in 2017.

Joseph “Buzz” Miller, executive vice president for Southern Nuclear, said Southern knew there were risks going into the project. “We haven’t built [reactors] in 30 years,” he noted.

Southern already was facing criticism from consumer groups that Georgia customers’ power needs could be met more cheaply by natural-gas-fired power plants and through conservation efforts.

Georgia Public Service Commissioner Tim Echols said he wants to see the plant finished but said consumers shouldn’t have to pay for the builders’ “learning curve.”

Continue reading “Why You’ve Heard of Solyndra, but not Vogtle”

I’ve been waiting for this.  Part of the nothing-burger kerfuffle over the recently leaked draft of the upcoming IPCC report, was a post on the increasingly desperate and delusional WattsUpWithThat “skeptic” site, that demanded an in depth take down by a stats-savvy expert. The redoubtable Tamino has gone above and beyond, and opened an extra large can of whupass, with maybe one of his best posts ever, reposted in entirety here.

Open Mind:

Clearly, David Whitehouse has enough rope. To hang himself.

The WUWT blog has a post by David Whitehouse (of the “Global Warming Policy Foundation”) discussing global temperature data. It features this graph (above) from the leaked copy of the not-yet-completed 5th assessment report (AR5) of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)

What’s surprising is that Whitehouse spends so little effort discussing the graph itself. Instead, he chooses to paint a perversely false picture of global temperature change.

For one thing, Whitehouse is indignant about a comparison of the global temperature trend over the last 50 years to that over the last 100 years. As Whitehouse says:

In Chapter 2 the report says that the AR4 report in 2007 said that the rate of change global temperature in the most recent 50 years is double that of the past 100 years. This is not true and is an example of blatant cherry-picking. Why choose the past 100 and the past 50 years? If you go back to the start of the instrumental era of global temperature measurements, about 1880 (the accuracy of the data is not as good as later years but there is no reason to dismiss it as AR5 does) then of the 0.8 – 0.9 deg C warming seen since then 0.5 deg C of it, i.e. most, occurred prior to 1940 when anthropogenic effects were minimal (according to the IPCC AR4).

Why choose 50 and 100 years? Because they’re nice round numbers, that’s why. They also make the point — the temperature trend (estimated by linear regression) really is twice as fast over the last 50 years as it was over the last 100 years.

What’s actually not true is Whitehouse’s claim that “of the 0.8 – 0.9 deg C warming seen since then 0.5 deg C of it, i.e. most, occurred prior to 1940.” It takes some real cherry-picking to do that.

The claim that “most of the warming occurred prior to 1940″ actually originated, as far as I know, in the mendacious “documentary” The Great Global Warming Swindle by Martin Durkin. To support that claim, Durkin simply faked the data.

Whitehouse just makes the claim, as if asserting it somehow makes it true. Let’s look at some actual data, from NASA. The only way to get 0.5 deg.C warming prior to 1940 is to take the difference between the lowest annual average and the highest annual average during that time period:

Continue reading “What Fake Skeptics Do”

“Cause” movies always tread on the line of being deadeningly earnest. Maybe in this case,Gus Van Sant’s direction might help.

There’s always the possibility of catching a wave of a current event – “China Syndrome” being the template for that.

Trailers also have to be careful not tipping the plot to hard – on first inspection, I’d say Matt Damon plays the soon-to-be conflicted corporate hot shot here, with John Kracinsky as the appealing good guy. Oh, now I see they wrote it. That explains some casting decisions.

CinemaBlend:

Though both Matt Damon and Krasinski say they never would have gotten the roles they have in Promised Land if they hadn’t written the script themselves, it seems to be more true for Krasinski, who has so perfected the role of wry Jim Halpert on The Office that it’s sometimes hard to see him as anyone else. In Promised Land Krasinski starts off a little like Jim, an affable and disarming guy who arrives in the same small town where Damon’s character, representing the gas company, is trying to convince local people to sign their farmland over to natural gas drilling. Krasinski, with his wide smile and plain facts about the dangers of gas drilling, a.k.a. “fracking,” becomes an immediate antagonist for Damon’s character, even when both men are convinced they have the best interest of this rural town at heart. Can the town save itself economically by signing these lucrative gas drilling deals? Or will they doom themselves with the environmental catastrophes fracking can bring?

Promised Land very deliberately doesn’t take a side on that debate, and as directed by Gus van Sant, it’s more interested in the tiny details of small-town life than taking any stand on an issue that’s only now gaining traction in the public conversation. As for Krasinski and Damon, they’re careful to talk about how much research they’ve done into the areas where fracking is happening, how many conversations they had with locals, and how much they each fall in the middle between a potential financial windfall for strapped communities and the environmental damage it could cause.