The electric power company E.On operates over 40% of the wind power in Germany (more than the entire installed USA wind capacity). In its 2005 Wind Report: http://www.eon-netz.com/EONNETZ_eng.jsp E.On states that in 2004 it had an installed wind power capacity of 7050MW and an average feed-in capacity of 1295MW (or 18.4% capacity factor). Figure 7 of the E.On report, entitled "Falling substitution capacity", states: "The more wind power capacity is in the grid, the lower the percentage of traditional generation it can replace."

"In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: Dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms."

As re-stated by Allan MacRae:
[Predicted 2020 traditional power actually replaced by wind]/[Predicted 2020
total nameplate wind capacity] = only 4%! Germany is now at 8%, which is bad enough, but will decline to 4% if all goes according to plan.

So an analysis by a German industry leader says it will install 12 to 24 times more wind power capacity than the conventional power that the wind power replaces.

On this basis, I suggest they would have to give away a wind turbine free with every Bratwurst to make wind power economic.

The more wind power capacity is in the grid, the lower the percentage of
traditional generation it can replace. Allan MacRae's suggested new slogan:
"Wind power, it doesn't just blow, it sucks!"
***********************

More on the Hockey stick (Item #1): A WSJ report, and analysis by Fred Singer.
Cambridge (UK) economist Alister McFarquhar comments on the non-meaning of Sustainable Development (Item #2).
Environmental elitism -- from Philip Stott's blog. I've also attached a link to the original article in the Manchester Guardian. The reporter just about gagged at O'Leary's comments. Hysterically funny, particularly comments on travel agents. A must-read. (Item #3)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1513268,00.html

Fox News is taking a lot of heat over its one-sided report on Global Warming, aired on Nov. 13 (Item #4).

The natural gas crisis is mostly caused by Enviros (WSJ, Nov 15, 2005). In Fred Singer's opinion, LNG presents a more severe security problem than imported oil": One can think of the LNG chain as a kind of pipeline; with only a few suppliers, mostly in Middle East; this makes LNG less fungible than oil. Further, an LNG tanker in port or a loaded LNG terminal is an attractive target for terrorists -- and as deadly as an atomic bomb (minus fallout). (Item #5).

Finally, more doom and gloom about GW. A Princeton group figures sea level rise by 2100 between 9 and 88 cm - take yr choice. No evidence but it makes great copy to flood New Jersey (Item #6). The perfect item to balance http://Iceagenow.com
**********************
****************
1. Global-Warming Skeptics Under Fire? Not really

"Two New Papers Question Results Used to Challenge Influential Climate Study" By ANTONIO REGALADO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL October 26, 2005; Page B3

Two global-warming skeptics who questioned an influential [hockey-stick] climate study and prompted a congressional inquiry are now facing critics of their own, as a pair of new research papers take issue with their results.
=====================

I looked at the vonStorch-Zorita paper in GRL (Oct 21, 2005), cited by WSJ story. It is a highly technical statistical discussion, and McIntyre-McKitrick (MM) respond very effectively in the same issue of GRL. If you want more detail, look at http://www.climateaudit.org
TO SUM UP: vS-Z is a big nothing-burger. Nonetheless, some quick observations:

1. vSZ agree that Mann's normalization is "unconventional " and could lead to an artificial hockey stick (AHS) if the 20th century mean temp is very different from the 1000-1901 mean (which is the case)

2. Expert statistician Francis Zwiers confirms the MM result (per private communication to vSZ) -- as I understand it

3. vSZ , using their pseudo-proxy approach, find only minor deviations from Mann's result. [Earlier, however, vS had termed Mann's work as "garbage']

4. But vSZ have addressed only one of the several criticisms raised by MM and have not commented on the others

5. The debate here centers on Mann's methodology. I want to remind that in their first paper (in E&E Nov 2003) MM found that Mann had mishandled the DATA underlying his analysis. Also: Mann refused to reveal changes to data and details of his methodology. Hence the famous letter from Joe Barton, insisting that publicly funded work must be made available for legitimate scientific purposes .
6. Finally, my own problems with Mann. I wrote him 5 years ago, asking why his analysis of proxies stopped in 1980. He wrote me that no suitable proxy data were available. But I have now collected a number of publications of proxies that show little or NO warming since 1980. Clearly, their use would have destroyed his calibration and the hockey stick

2. Sustainability and the Monarchy. Is it?
By Alister McFarquhar

EVERYTHING is "sustainable" these days: there are sustainable cars, sustainable blocks of flats, even sustainable school dinners. The Prince of Wales said this week that if we wanted to save the planet, we must all eat more local, "sustainable" food, and complained that we couldn't go on importing food by jet aircraft.

The concept of sustainability has been used by the environmental movement since at least the 1970s, but it acquired general currency as a result of Our Common Future, a report published in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development. The Commission was chaired by a Norwegian - former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. According to the Brundtland report, sustainable development is anything "which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" - a definition that the UN Division for Sustainable Development has adopted.

In the absence of any precise meaning, the concept of sustainability is pointless. It could mean virtually anything, and therefore means absolutely nothing. It has become merely a marketing slogan.

But in UN and World Bank reports, in Global Companies going green albeit cosmetic, and even in Local Government, the word 'sustainable' has proved sustainable in the titles of reports. It smacks of apple pie and motherhood [but not single]. It is the new Malthus doctrine, substituting environment and economic growth for famine and population. It fails to recognise we have never run out of resources as we substitute one for another: And that the Environment is better in rich than poor countries.

I have no problem with Royalty in business or advertising their products -- organic or other. Or with pollution being penalised. But the current attack on air and other transport assumes that environment degradation is due to carbon emissions. This is not proven but is assumed by green politicians, many employed as scientists. That well-known individuals, in Government and politicised and evangelical environment lobbies, have captured the ear of HRH the PoW bodes ill for the future of the Monarchy and our Constitution, which puts Monarchy beyond politics.
***********

3. Environmental elitism: I smell a class rat.....
From Philip Stott's blog, November 08, 2005

Oh! I do like it when a tough, rough business 'person' punctures the PC platitudinousness of our more poncy PC environmentalists. And today's 'Quote of the Day' is a blinder in this respect.

Here is Michael O'Leary, Chief Executive of Europe's biggest low-cost airline, Ryanair [first half profits up to a record £160 million], on the environmentalists who are constantly whinging on about its low-fare structure increasing emissions:

"We will double our emissions in the next five years because we are doubling our traffic. But if preserving the environment means stopping poor people flying so only the rich can fly, then screw it."

And when you think about it, Mr. O'Leary has a good point. Scratch an environmentalist, and you will invariably find an elitist. First, as I have pointed out before on this blog, the leaders of the UK environmental movement are a particularly toffee-nosed bunch, Lord Snootys to a chap and gal, from Prince Charles to an Eton mafia [e.g. (Honourable Sir) Jonathan Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet, CBE, educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford - to be fair, he doesn't use his title].

Secondly, have you noticed? Environmentalists always want things "to cost more", from organic parsley to hemp underwear. It's hard cheese if you are on benefits, lass. Thirdly, they are forever hollering for more taxes and tolls, charges and curbs, on everything, and all of these proposed taxes are retrogressive on the poor. And finally, they just have to fly, my darlings, or drive spiffing cars, because what they do is so important, and, in any case, they will plant a few pretty trees on their estates to offset their 'naughtiness'.

The double standards are often breathtaking. I have never forgotten watching a television report of a 'Top People's Bash' in which a leading posh UK environmentalist stood blithely in front of a line of limousines delivering the great and the good of the environmental and PC worlds to the feast while lecturing the rest of us, 'the bedint', on environmentalist ethics. It really was the "We haves" and "You shall not haves". "If you don't do what We say, Nanny will be wery, wery cross."

To adapt a famous quotation: "Only the little people pay environmental taxes."

When you deconstruct so much of the environmentalist pieties, you will smell a class rat lurking beneath the garbage. And just watch the rich 'Green' farmers wriggle when you talk about the evils of subsidies and the need for free trade.

Class warfare? You bet. Thank goodness for the Michael O'Learys; we need them to blow away all this trustafarian tosh.

Yet, in the real world, despite all the nannying, the 'Sunday Colour Supplement Greenies' don't stand a chance. I also noticed that another low-cost airline, EasyJet, has just recorded a 13.7% increase in passenger numbers. It's up, up and away.
===============

Among its many faults, the Kyoto Protocol is an attack by rich elitists upon
the poor. It has been obvious for several years that Kyoto is based on deeply flawed
science and economics, yet these important points have been suppressed by
governments and much of the media, and scientific debate has been stifled by
scoundrels and imbeciles.

Kyoto and other such CO2 abatement schemes are massive wastes of scarce global resources that should be used to alleviate real problems, not squandered on fictitious ones. Kyoto is therefore fundamentally anti-environmental as well as anti-human.

Dr. Richard Lindzen, Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT and a co-author
of the 2001 UN IPCC and US NAS reports elegantly wrote in the Wall Street
Journal on June 11, 2001:

"The full IPCC report is an admirable description of research activities in
climate science, but it is not specifically directed at policy. The Summary
for Policymakers is, but it is also a very different document. It represents
a consensus of government representatives (many of whom are also their
nations' Kyoto representatives), rather than of scientists. The resulting
document has a strong tendency to disguise uncertainty, and conjures up some
scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.

Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with
which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens.
This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It
is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational
decisions..."

4. 'The Heat Is On' Fox News for 'Global Warming' Special
By Marc Morano
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
November 15, 2005
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=\Culture\archive\200511\CUL20051115a.html

(CNSNews.com) - A climatologist Monday was quick to dismiss the Fox News special on "global warming," complaining that it featured "profoundly juvenile climate science."

As Cybercast News Service previously reported, Sunday's hour-long program titled "The Heat Is On: The Case of Global Warming," included a verbal disclaimer by Fox News warning viewers that only one side of the scientific debate would be represented.

Environmental activists Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Laurie David, wife of comic Larry David, were featured in the documentary and have praised the news channel for producing the program. The documentary ignored scientific skeptics who believe that human activity is not responsible for catastrophic climate change.

Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, the author of several books on climate change including "Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media," believes the contribution of human activity on planetary warming will be "modest" and pointed out several examples of what Fox News omitted in terms of the scientific debate.

"The net ice balance in Antarctica is positive, it is gaining ice," Michaels said, noting that the Fox News special only focused on areas where ice is melting to imply an alarming rise in sea level is imminent. Michaels is an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Antarctica "will contribute to reduction in sea level because it is gaining ice ... The net ice balance in Greenland is very close to neutral," Michaels added.

Other scientific information was lacking, according to Michaels. "There have been three periods in the last 2,000 years in which Alaska was as warm as it is now; the show failed to mention that," he said.

"Because of the nature of planetary warming and the central behavior of our computer models, we now know with considerable confidence that warming within the foreseeable future will be modest," Michaels added. "The other side, which I now include Fox News on, seems to do everything it can to suppress that story."

Michaels also disputed an assertion by Laurie David on Fox News Channel's "On The Record: With Greta Van Susteren" last week.

After noting that people should "worry a lot" about climate change, David asserted, "there's been more consensus on this issue than there was consensus on smoking causes cancer."

"To counter the argument that climate change will be modest requires invalidating billions of dollars worth of climate models," Michaels responded.

Meanwhile, the author of a new book debunking alarmist predictions on climate change is charging that Fox News Channel got "hoodwinked" by airing only one perspective.

"The American people are being hoodwinked not just by the green activists, but by the scientists who get billions of dollars for creating global climate models that can't even forecast backward, let alone forward," said Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues in an interview with Cybercast News Service.

Avery is the co-author of the upcoming 2006 book entitled "Unstoppable Global warming-Every 1500 Years." The book is written with S. Fred Singer, the president of The Science & Environmental Policy Project. Avery maintains that any modest planetary warming is part of Earth's natural cycle.

Avery joined Michaels in disputing what he termed the "alarmist" scientific scenarios in the Fox News special.

"We are in our third warming in recorded human history. We had the Roman warming and the Romans thrived," Avery said. The second warming was during the medieval period, when "most of the castles and cathedrals of Europe were constructed ... because there was more food and thus more people and more labor"

Looking at more recent history, "the Arctic was warmer in 1930 than it is today," Avery said, insisting that any current warming trend is not unique or alarming.

"We have evidence from around the globe in ice cores, sea bed sediments, cave stalagmites and pollen of fossilized pollen, that show that these [climate] cycles have existed for the last million years. They are moderate, natural and solar linked," Avery said.

Contrary to the Fox News special, which depicted large portions of Florida being inundated in the future with rising sea levels as ice melts, Avery said there is nothing to worry about.

"It's not a disaster. Every single species on the planet has been through at least 600 of these two degree (Celsius) warming cycles," he said, referring to past warming periods.

Jody Clarke, the spokeswoman for the free market environmental group Competitive Enterprise Institute, (CEI) joined in the criticism of the Fox News special.

Clarke said she was "surprised" by the opening disclaimer, which explained that viewers would "hear primarily from those experts and citizens who believe that global warming is a crisis."

Clarke said after watching the show, she realized that the disclaimer "should have said all of the experts will express this particular point of view," noting the absence of any contrarian scientific point of view in the hour-long program. CEI sent a letter to Fox News CEO Roger Ailes last week protesting that only one scientific perspective was featured in the special.

"I thought [the special] was pretty low on substance and poorly produced. It was very superficial," Clarke said.

See Earlier Article:
Greens Praise Fox News 'Global Warming' Documentary (Nov. 11, 2005)
Fox News CEO Warms to Climate Change After Heat From Left (Nov. 9, 2005)

Make media inquiries or request an interview with Marc Morano.

Subscribe to the free CNSNews.com daily E-brief.

E-mail a comment or news tip to Marc Morano.

Send a Letter to the Editor about this article.

5. A Vulnerable Natural Gas Supply
By S. Fred Singer. Letter to WSJ published 11/15/2005

Holman Jenkins (Nov. 2) well describes the precarious supply situation for natural gas, exacerbated by the recent hurricanes. There has been a seven-fold increase in price in just a few years, with severe economic consequences to low-income households, farmers, and many industries. Its price of $14 per MCF (1000 cubic foot) corresponds in heating value to $80 per barrel crude oil and $350 (!) per ton of coal. The situation is certain to get worse - much worse -- unless drastic actions are taken to increase supply and moderate demand.

Enviros can take much credit for this crisis. On the supply side, they have fought against opening up opportunities to develop onshore and offshore resources. On the demand side, they've fought against coal-fired power plants, citing first acid rain and then the emission of carbon dioxide -- creating fears of global warming. And in fighting the nuclear alternative, they cited other convenient excuses. As a result of stringent controls and crippling lawsuits against constructing new coal and nuclear plants, utilities over the past two decades rushed to build so many gas-burning plants that demand has now badly outstripped domestic supply. Unless this situation is reversed quickly, freeing up large quantities of natural gas, we may soon be forced to import costly and insecure LNG (liquefied natural gas) -- much of it from the Middle East.

The security problems are especially severe. LNG lacks the easy fungibility of oil since there are only a few sources that have invested in complex liquefaction plants. Supply cut-offs, whether accidental, by sabotage, or politically inspired, can therefore be effective. Further, LNG's specially designed tanker vessels and unloading terminals provide ready targets for terrorists.

Of course, these arguments may not persuade environmental groups and others that have been against all practical forms of energy and insist on touting "sustainable" generation, like wind mills.

"At a time when America needs large amounts of low-cost reliable power, wind produces puny amounts of high-cost unreliable power." Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) (Associated Press, 6-12-05.)
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S. Fred Singer is professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and directs the non-profit, non-partisan Science & Environmental Policy Project in Arlington, Virginia
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6. Rising sea levels threaten New Jersey - study says
http://reuters.myway.com/article/20051116/2005-11-16T232315Z_01_MCC684168_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-ENVIRONMENT-NEWJERSEY-DC.html

By Jon Hurdle, Nov 16,2005

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Rising sea levels caused by global warming could shrink New Jersey by up to 3 percent in the next 100 years, U.S. scientists warned on Wednesday.

The Princeton University researchers also projected that as much as 9 percent of the state's low-lying land could be hit by periodic coastal flooding in a trend that would devastate property, disrupt wildlife, erode beaches, and salinate drinking water in populated areas.

"Sea level rise is a significant and growing threat to New Jersey," Princeton professors Matthew Cooper, Michael Beevers and Michael Oppenheimer wrote in the report titled "Future Sea Level Rise and the New Jersey Coast."

Coastal development, which has surged in recent years, is increasingly susceptible to inundation by rising sea waters, the erosion of beaches and low-lying areas, and storm-induced flooding, the report said.

New Jersey's coastal counties, which contain about 60 percent of the state's 8.6 million people, are vulnerable to rising sea levels because of a flat coastal plain, a gently sloping shoreline and barrier islands, beaches and salt marshes.

The combination can produce extensive shoreline changes with relatively small rises in sea level, the report said.

New Jersey authorities have responded to the threat by taking steps such as reinforcing flood-prone structures and building up dunes, but those efforts are likely to fail, it said.

The best response to rising sea levels is to restrict development in vulnerable coastal areas, the researchers concluded.

The authors called for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, which many scientists believe lead to global warming, as the most effective way of reducing the rate of sea-level rise.

Cutting emissions would have a limited effect on sea levels over the next 50 years, but it could slow the rate by 2100 and beyond, the report said.
Worldwide, sea levels are expected to rise between 0.09 and 0.88 meter (0.29 and 2.88 feet) between 1990 and 2100, the report said, citing figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.