Electricity

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #324

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Brought to You by www.SEPP.org The Science and Environmental Policy Project

By Ken Haapala, President

Group Think-Bureaucratic Science: Last week’s TWTW discussed Judith Curry’s review of a rather remarkable paper by retired MIT professor Carl Wunsch, who participated in 1979 report “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment,” headed by Jule Charney. The findings in Charney Report have become the core reasoning for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), and many US government actions, including the EPA’s illogical finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and welfare.

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Global Solar Power Installations Will Crash 24% in 2018

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By Eric Worrall – Re-Blogged From WUWT

h/t James Delingpole – This is a bad year for renewable energy.

Goldman Sachs Puts a Grim Number on Solar Slump for This Year

By Chris Martin
20 July 2018

Anyone following clean energy knew this could be a tough year for solar. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. just put a grim number on how bad.

The pace of global installations will contract by 24 percent in 2018, Goldman analysts led by Brian Lee said in a research note late Wednesday. That’s far more dire than the 3 percent decline forecast by Bloomberg NEF in the bleakest of three scenarios outlined in a report earlier this month. Credit Suisse Group AG is forecasting a 17 percent contraction.

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Spiders and Space Weather

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Re-Blogged From Space Weather

Did you know that spiders can fly? Biologists call it “ballooning.” Spiders spin a strand of silk, it juts into the air, and off they go. Airborne arachnids have been found as high as 4 km off the ground. Originally, researchers thought spiders were riding currents of air, but there’s a problem with that idea. Spiders often take flight when the air is calm, and large spiders fly even when air currents are insufficient to support their weight. It’s a mystery.


Above: Just before ballooning, spiders adopt a posture shown here called “tiptoeing.”

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Poverty and Energy

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By Andy May – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

Poverty and access to energy are closely related. Although it probably isn’t possible to show that access to energy is the key reason so many have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades, the data and logic suggests that this so. In the United States, the average person uses about 300 million BTUs of energy per year according to the EIA. This is equivalent to the manual labor of 69 healthy people working hard for 6 hours per day. Worldwide, the average person uses 73 million BTUs, the equivalent of 16 hardworking people.

Prior to the industrial age, which began with the first practical coal- and wood-fired steam engines between 1712 and 1776, slavery, bonded servants and serfs were common, this group made up over 90% of the world’s population in 1800. For a few people to live well they needed lots of servants and domestic animals to do the manual labor for them. Now, in the age of electricity, petroleum and nuclear powerplants, most manual labor can be done by machines. No longer do a few wealthy people live from the labor of others, everyone who has access to energy can live well. Before the industrial age, nearly everyone was extremely poor as seen in Figure 1, today fewer than 10% are extremely poor.

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Pope Francis’s Misguided War

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By H. Sterling Burnett – Re-Blogged From American Thinker

It seems that Pope Francis has learned little since his 2015 papal encyclical calling on the world to fight climate change by limiting the use of modern technologies and fossil fuels. At a recent Vatican meeting he called many of the world’s leading oil company executives to the carpet. Francis told the executives they should shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources to fight “global warming.”

Pope Francis has myriad misguided beliefs about climate science, almost all of which he holds based on faith alone, as if they were holy writ. Even worse, his belief that society can transition from fossil fuels while reducing hunger and poverty is downright dangerous.

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California Wildfires of 2017 Were Blamed on Global Warming. Never Mind.

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By Anthony Watts – Re-Blogged From http://www.WattsUpWithThat.com

On June 8th, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) made its first official announcement via press release that 12 big Northern California wildfires in October 2017 were caused by problems associated with electric utility power lines.

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