I don't know where the author of this article stands: Cooling Pacific has dampened.... (Guardian, 28 Aug), but the research pointed to does suggest that the longer Pacific Decadal cycle behind the La Nina/El Nino pattern is a major factor in the observed slow down in increasing temperatures (although that is not the same as a cooling, it's just a slower rate of warming).

Well, Tom, I think the far greater concern here is that the business interests and anti-science(religious) crowd are going to deny Global Warming for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits. I accept that those who believe in Global Warming have their own biases ( whether financial or just the egotistical bias we have when we think we are right about something), but Global Warming has become politicized primarily by business interests who are concerned about the costs they will incur if remedies to Global Warming are put into place and religious groups who are anti-science reflexively because science undermines religious belief. And I don't understand the concept of rejecting authority when it comes to science when the alternative is to accept reasons that are not subject to falsification (not scientifically provable).

Is an op-ed science, though? Is someone writing an op-ed about science acting scientifically even if they are a scientist?

The key is not to get confused between the 'authority' - a scientist- and the evidence - the science. Studies and papers have to be peer reviewed, and even then published in a way that makes them challengeable.

Scepticism is in order - indeed it is a core principle of the scientific method - but cynicism (which seems to be where Tom is leading us) means never trusting anything, ever. At the very least he is taking a very postmodern stance (interestingly combined with the stream-of-conciousness prose).

There are very significant business interests on both sides of the debate. The growth of the renewables industry in recent years, in response to the staggering levels of pubic subsidy that are being thrown at what are woefully inaqequate technologies, has created all kinds of perverse incentives for the misrepresentation of the 'the science' from the other direction. This is something that is still largely unacknowledged in public debate, but it's becoming unavoidable.

The exact science of climate change is one thing, the political prescriptions the science is used to support are quite another. It's far from obvious to me that even if you accept the predictions of the IPCC that it follows you must also accept an energy policy that ramps up the costs to consumers so as to support enormous subsidies paid out to the richest landowners in the country, which is the effect of Britain's ruinous wind energy policy. The problem though is that it's very difficult to have a rational debate about this because politicians are using the supposedly unimpeachable conclusions of the science as if that marks both the beginning and the end of any discussion, meaning they can railroad through whatever pet renewable schemes they want whatever the cost. This isn't the fault of the scientists of course, but one unfortunate consequence is that those who are opposed to the economically suicidal green energy policies currently in vogue in the west are labelled as being anti-science and therefore pushed into a position where they almost have to attack the science in order to reinforce their point. It's not a healthy development.

Very well put Sass! Myself, yes I am skeptical but I am not in denial either. I simply see too much information from the other viewpoint, it is too quickly dismissed while the errors, the hidden data, the closed groups and the flat out lies by the warmist crowd are explained away with ease. Something smells fishy yet "science" can't be wrong, these people are seemingly above reproach and any questioning of them or their data is met with scorn. Heck, the first thing they say is that person is employed by big oil while (as Sass pointed out) the similar reasons to question the warmists is ignored and that is a problem no doubt! And most of the claims the warmists have predicted have seemed to pass by without happening, a simple adjustment and they call for it a bit further out and nobody has any problems with it, again, very fishy!?

Cynicism is what you read on the one side while ignoring the cynicism on the other?
Science is to be questioned yet the IPCC guards their information and they try to have data only evaluated by their own kind, when we question the statistics we are now "cynical" why is questioning any other theory good science but here it's another? Why am I "cynical" to do as you suggested is good science? Why is it not the warmists who are cynical of any who DARE question them?

Sassenach wrote:The exact science of climate change is one thing, the political prescriptions the science is used to support are quite another. It's far from obvious to me that even if you accept the predictions of the IPCC that it follows you must also accept an energy policy that ramps up the costs to consumers so as to support enormous subsidies paid out to the richest landowners in the country, which is the effect of Britain's ruinous wind energy policy.

Actually, the richest landowners in the country get more from agricultural subsidies. On energy policy, nuclear subsidies are also higher than that for wind & solar combined.

GMTom wrote:Science is to be questioned yet the IPCC guards their information and they try to have data only evaluated by their own kind, when we question the statistics we are now "cynical" why is questioning any other theory good science but here it's another?

The IPCC reports are all public and refer to openly available scientific studies. Anyone can evaluate the data if they want - it is publicly available also.

I see you question the statistics, but I see nothing more substantial. And so far I've seen no evidence of a cooling that you claim has been happening. By all means be cynical, but can we not be a little dubious about your assertions too?

Acknowledging that humans have a profound effect on the environment is very different than what to do to mitigate it.

From previous discussions one of the most effective things that can be done is preserving forests. Personally I like that one and I think you get the most bang for the buck. I even like the idea of doing away with corn based cattle feed lots and switching to grassland, bring the prairies back.

Also inflationary monetary policy plays a big role in this. If growth is always forced as a matter of policy our footprint as humans can only grow as well. Unless there's a way to make all growth translate into environmental efficiency.

Actually, the richest landowners in the country get more from agricultural subsidies. On energy policy, nuclear subsidies are also higher than that for wind & solar combined.

Solar isn't so much of a problem because the technology has advanced to the stage where it's not far off being economically competitive in its own right. The subsidies have already been reduced and eventually it'll get to the stage where we no longer need to subsidise it. That's fine. Wind is a totally different animal. It'll never be competitively priced and can't possibly hope to provide our energy needs. Nuclear has vastly more potential. The fact that France is almost entirely nuclear shows that it needn't be a massive drain on the economy, and in any case the technology is improving.

The fact that rich landowners also benefit from agricultural subsidies is not an argument in favour of windfarms. As you should know by now, I'm not big into the way we subsidise agriculture either. One monumental waste doesn't justify another.

Sassenach wrote:Solar isn't so much of a problem because the technology has advanced to the stage where it's not far off being economically competitive in its own right. The subsidies have already been reduced and eventually it'll get to the stage where we no longer need to subsidise it. That's fine.

Indeed. But the cost of wind power is also falling, and it is becoming more economic.

We are still experiencing far more price effects from gas market changes here than we are from subsidies of wind.

Wind is a totally different animal. It'll never be competitively priced and can't possibly hope to provide our energy needs.

Huh? No-one claims that wind will provide all our needs (and neither will solar) - what you need is a balance of different complementary generation methods.

Nuclear has vastly more potential. The fact that France is almost entirely nuclear shows that it needn't be a massive drain on the economy, and in any case the technology is improving.

Again, nuclear is a 60 year old industry and we are still massively subsidising it. So is France (although those of us who have EDF as a supplier are also helping them). Yes, nuclear technology is improving. So is wind turbine technology.

The fact that rich landowners also benefit from agricultural subsidies is not an argument in favour of windfarms. As you should know by now, I'm not big into the way we subsidies agriculture either. One monumental waste doesn't justify another.

Indeed. But the cost of wind power is also falling, and it is becoming more economic.

It's way off being even remotely competitive with fossil fuels and almost certainly never will be anywhere close.

We are still experiencing far more price effects from gas market changes here than we are from subsidies of wind.

The biggest gas market change the world has seen in recent years has been the halving of the wholesale gas price in the US thanks to frakking, something the renewables industry is doing its damnedest to try and block in this country.

Huh? No-one claims that wind will provide all our needs (and neither will solar) - what you need is a balance of different complementary generation methods.

I have no prblem with a balanced mix of energy, but not at any price. As I said, solar is fine because it has the potential to generate power at a competitive price. I've yet to see any evidence that you can say the same for wind power. The only reason it's being pushed so hard is that it's an extant technology that can be rolled out immediately to help governments hit their arbitrary renewables targets. That's not a sufficient justification for pushing up energy bills.

Again, nuclear is a 60 year old industry and we are still massively subsidising it. So is France (although those of us who have EDF as a supplier are also helping them). Yes, nuclear technology is improving. So is wind turbine technology.

Nuclear has the potential to provide baseload power generation, which you can't say about either wind or solar. That alone makes it more worthy of subsidy than either of them. But sure, if you push me I'll be quite happy to say that we should not heavily subsidise nuclear either. I'd sooner we relied on shale gas for the next 50 years until properly revolutionary technology comes along.

while I am skeptical of climate change predictions of doom and gloom, I am 100% behind alternative renewable energy, it simply makes good sense! I also agree on subsidizing research on these. We can help the next revolutionary technology along without the climate scares.
I have been out of the electric business for quite a few years now but not all "that" long ago, wind power was all the rage while being incredibly inefficient! maybe it has come a ways, maybe it never will ...if not yet, then stop kicking a dead dog and move on to something new!

In my opinion the money we're currently pumping into wind subsidies would be far better spent on funding R&D on the widest possible range of alternative technologies. We know wind isn't good enough so it's a clear waste of resources. The same goes for corn ethanol subsidies, which are even more scandalous and equally compromised by vested interests with their nose in the trough.

Politically speaking there's a problem though. Governments have agreed to various binding treaty commitments which say they have to reduce emissions by a fixed amount over a fixed period of time. These deadlines are largely arbitrary but they matter because governments have bound themselves to the targets and they have to find a way to try and hit them. As it stands there are very few renewables technologies that can be installed straight away. Wind is a mature technology that is proven to work. The fact that it's woefully inefficient and drives up the costs to consumers doesn't seem to matter that much, because in order to hit the emissions targets goivernments have very little in the way of other choices they can make. As an aside btw, this is why the seemingly arcane arguments about the disputed 'pause' in global temperature increases are actually very significant. It's not so much that it may disprove the AGW hypothesis, which I think is widely accepted, but if it turns out the rate of warming is much slower than was first predicted then it means we have much longer to deal with the problem, which in turn means we don't need to rush into the first renewable technology that comes along.

Sassenach wrote:It's way off being even remotely competitive with fossil fuels and almost certainly never will be anywhere close.

I'm conscious that we've both been making assertions, but neither of us have presented evidence.

I make no claims that these sources are unbiased, but here we are:

Clean energy least costly to power America's electricity needs (Science Codex)

In fact—using the official U.S. government estimates of health and environmental costs from burning fossil fuels—the study shows it's cheaper to replace a typical existing coal-fired power plant with a wind turbine than to keep the old plant running. And new electricity generation from wind could be more economically efficient than natural gas.

Cost of electricity by source (wikipedia)

There are several comparison made across different energy sources. Looking across them, onshore wind usually has lower total costs than coal, solar, nuclear, biomass and geothermal. It is comparable to hydro, and even cheaper than some types of gas power generation.

The main cost of wind power is the capital cost of setting up the turbines, and that is sensitive to prices of metals and the technology available. Once in place, however, the generation cost is very low, and not related to other market factors much - maintenance costs are the main ones, but turbines powered by steam also take a lot of maintenance, and that is what oil, gas, coal & nuclear stations use.

and finally [url]http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/RE_Technologies_Cost_Analysis-WIND_POWER.pdf]Renewable Energy Technologies: Cost Analysis Series vol 5/5 - Wind Power[/url] (pdf - 2.3MB) which has a lot of data about the costs and how they may change over time.

I submit that it is not only quite likely that wind will economically compete with fossil fuels, but that it already does.

Sassenach wrote:The biggest gas market change the world has seen in recent years has been the halving of the wholesale gas price in the US thanks to frakking, something the renewables industry is doing its damnedest to try and block in this country.

We would not see the same effect - as advocates of fracking in the UK readily agree, mainly because we have stricter standards in terms of how fracking can operate. This does mean some of the issues like contaminated water are much less likely to appear here.

I'm not sure we can put all of the gas price fall in the US down to fracking. The comparison is often with the peak price in 2007-8 (which we also had, and which we also saw a sharp decline from in 2009 which suggests it was a result of the recession).

Natural gas prices (wikipedia) - see the first graph. The main recent trend was a fall during the recession mirrored in the UK and USA, followed by it being relatively flat in the US while gradually rising in the UK. You could attribute the US price not rising to fracking, or alternatively to it not being connected via Europe to Russia and it's frequent price changes/blackmail.

Sassenach wrote:I have no prblem with a balanced mix of energy, but not at any price. As I said, solar is fine because it has the potential to generate power at a competitive price. I've yet to see any evidence that you can say the same for wind power. The only reason it's being pushed so hard is that it's an extant technology that can be rolled out immediately to help governments hit their arbitrary renewables targets. That's not a sufficient justification for pushing up energy bills.

But does it actually push up energy bills? And does it have to? I've posted enough links for now, I reckon - your turn.

Sassenach wrote:Nuclear has the potential to provide baseload power generation, which you can't say about either wind or solar. That alone makes it more worthy of subsidy than either of them. But sure, if you push me I'll be quite happy to say that we should not heavily subsidise nuclear either. I'd sooner we relied on shale gas for the next 50 years until properly revolutionary technology comes along.

When it comes to subsidies, the main difference between nuclear and wind is that the costs for nuclear are ongoing - after construction there is the cost of obtaining and refining the fuel and then - crucially - dealing with the toxic waste products. For wind the main cost is in the initial capital cost of construction and installation.

I'm not sure fracking is that great a way. Besides, a few miles away from me they are planning a different but by no means less controversial idea - Underground Coal Gasification (UGC) - digging into seams of coal, lighting them up and extracting the resulting gas.

Dan, I had a quick look through those figures and I have to say I'm sceptical. Firstly, correct me if this is a misreading of the data but it looks like they've simply decided to add in an additional cost factor that they've more or less plucked out of the air for fossil fuel sources that do not have carbon capture technology. Secondly, isn't it making a massive assumption about the reliability of wind power ? Wind power never runs at full capacity. A casual glance at the internet has proven tricky to find the proper hard data on capacity factors for wind turbines, but I did find this:

http://notrickszone.com/2013/04/28/wind ... ing-money/

The guy is obviously sceptical about renewable energy, but his data seem perfectly sound. For the whole month of April the best output achieved by the 32000 MWh listed capacity of Germany's wind turbines was 18000MWh, which it achieved for just 2 hours on one particular day. In order to make up the shortfall Germany has to have coal and gas power stations sitting by ready to take up the slack when the wind isn't blowing (which needless to say is a lot of the time). However, as he also points out, this means that the efficiency of those stations is seriously reduced, meaning that they actually lose money, so the German taxpayer is having to subsidise both wind and fossil fuel generation.

If you're going to make an assessment of the relative importance of the capital costs as against the ongoing fuel costs of different methods of power generation over the lifecycle of an installation, as those figures you quoted on Wikipedia do, then you can only properly assess wind power if you know what the capacity factor is going to be. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see that crucial piece of data. If they're assuming listed capacity = actual capacity then the figures are grossly misrepresenting the real situation, because the reality is that the capital costs will probably be 2-3x higher to take into account the extra turbines that you'll need to generate the same amount of power.

I found this site as well:

https://www.wind-watch.org/faq-output.php

I haven't read around the site, only this article, so I don't know about it's overall slant, but I'm assuming it's probably an anti-wind site and should be viewed accordingly. However, data is data and this is interesting:

What is wind power’s capacity credit?

Wind power has a very low “capacity credit,” its ability to replace other sources of power. For example, in the U.K., which boasts of being the windiest country in Europe, the Royal Academy of Engineering projects that 25,000 MW of wind power will reduce the need for conventional power capacity by 4,000 MW, a 16% capacity credit. Two studies in Germany projected that 48,000 MW of wind power will allow reducing conventional capacity by only 2,000 MW, a 4% capacity credit (as described in “Wind Report 2005,” Eon Netz). Similarly, the Irish Grid calculated that 3,500 MW of wind power could replace 496 MW of conventional power, a 14% capacity credit, and that as more wind turbines are added their capacity credit approaches zero. And the New York State Energy Research & Development Authority found in March 2005 that onshore wind power would have a capacity credit of 10%, based on a theoretical capacity factor of 30%. (See some of these and other documents here at National Wind Watch.)

How much back-up power is needed for wind power?

According to Eon Netz, one of the four grid managers in Germany, with 7,050 MW of wind power capacity installed in its area at the end of 2004, the amount of back-up required was over 80%, which was the maximum output observed from all of their wind power facilities together. That is, for every 10 MW of wind power added to the system in this case, at least 8 MW of back-up power must also be dedicated.

In other words, wind needs 100% back-up of its maximum output.

The point about backup is key for me. If we're going to need 80% backup capacity for wind turbines then why do we even have the turbines in the first place ? Now ok, he does seem to be quoting studies here that date from 2003-4 and it may well be the case that wind power has become much more efficient in the interim (in fact I'd be surprised if it hasn't), but even so I very much dount they've gotten backup capacity requirements down below 50%. I fail to see how this is a sensible use of resources.

as I mentioned, it has been many years...
But I used to work in the electrical industry, right at the time we saw these windmill things popping up all over the place. I had spoken to many people intimately involved in this and every last one said it was a poor investment. The initial cost is great but the maintenance is what these people were more concerned about, they seldom run at an efficient level let alone peak and the total costs are just nowhere near where they need to be to consider wind as any sort of real option.
But again, this was 15-20 years ago and things may have changed drastically (but it was SO bad, I seriously doubt it)