Thread: Climate alarmists change vocabulary for losing argument

EDITORIAL: Hedging on global warming

Climate alarmists change vocabulary for losing argument

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
7:40 p.m., Friday, September 17, 2010

In a season of rebranding, the White House has thrown the old "global warming" bugaboo under the bus in favor of a new propaganda campaign against so-called "global climate disruption." White House science adviser John P. Holdren, who has been promoting this term since at least 2007, calls "global warming" a "dangerous misnomer" that "implies something gradual, uniform and benign." According to his alarmist school, the world is facing a danger that is complex, chaotic and coming on fast.

Climate alarmists previously attempted to rebrand their pet peeve as "global climate change," but that term wasn't frightening enough to motivate an increasingly skeptical public. It also doesn't mesh with other Obama administration messaging; it's hard to take a stand against "change" when that word has been branded as one of the pillars of the Obama mystique.

Scary-sounding "disruption" is a much better propaganda tool than "warming" because warming can be quantified easily and thus disproved. The climate-change cult has had a difficult time the past decade or so as carbon emissions continued to rise but temperatures began to fall. They made many rhetorical attempts to salvage the situation, such as denying the decline, saying temperatures would rise later and making the classic nonsensical argument that global warming causes global cooling.

By contrast, "disruption" is vague and can be applied to just about anything that would - under other circumstances - simply be called "the weather." A tornado near New York City? Disruption. Massive blizzards hitting Washington D.C.? More disruption. A milder-than-usual summer? Yes, even that is disruption. Armed with this term, the climate Chicken Littles can point to whatever they want without fear of contradiction.

While purported warming was supposed to be a long-term phenomenon that would lead eventually to things like island inundation and dramatic coastal flooding - none of which has happened yet, by the way - "disruption" has the flavor of near-term catastrophe. In the disrupted world, people are always living in the end times, and life is a permanent disaster movie. Similar scare tactics were used in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when alarmists thundered that this was just the beginning. The coming hurricane seasons, they lectured in ominous tones, would be even worse. Major cities would be annihilated unless Americans took immediate action and adopted their radical agenda. Yet no hurricanes made landfall in the United States in the 2006 season, and there were just two major hurricanes in the Western Hemisphere that year and in 2007, down from seven in 2005. It was quite an inconvenient truth.

Best of all from the alarmists' point of view is that "disruption" is so broad a threat that they can propose a variety of new government controls, regulations, mandates, taxes and other impositions on individual freedoms to deal with it. Ideologues such as Mr. Holdren are never at a loss when coming up with methods for the state to expand its powers over the individual. They are swimming against the tide, however. Resorting to this new, more panicky terminology betrays their anxiousness. They had their shot at "cap and trade," carbon taxing and enslaving the economy to their arcane theories, but they came up short. Now they hope to win an argument through fear that they couldn't carry by reason. They don't have a snowball's chance.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... l-warming/

Part II: Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable

OVERBLOWN: Getting to the Facts on Emissions

By Institute for Energy Research
Friday, September 17, 2010

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable—Mark Twain

This section reviews the criticism AWEA makes about the Bentek report and the evidence the organization offers purporting to prove how wind reduced substantial greenhouse gas emissions in Texas and Colorado. The section concludes with an examination of what the EIA data really show for those states for 2007 versus 2008—and what the official Energy Information Administration (EIA) reports say about causal factors for any CO2 reductions.

The Bentek study showed that wind volatility in the sampled regions of Colorado and Texas caused more CO2 emissions than would have been the case with less wind and more efficient coal plants. Using mostly sub-hourly performance data, Bentek was able to “examine in detail how coal, gas and wind interact and the resulting emissions implications.â€

Part III, Wind power, load balancing, carbon footprints

OVERBLOWN: Further Analyses

By Institute for Energy Research
Saturday, September 18, 2010

Originally posted on MasterResource by Jon Boone, September 15, 2010
SCIENCE IS THE DISINTERESTED SEARCH FOR THE OBJECTIVE TRUTH ABOUT THE MATERIAL WORLD. – Richard Dawkins

This post in our series looks at how the integration of wind variability affects thermal activity on the grid, favors flexible natural gas generators, and influences economic dispatch and the spot market. It also examines how estimates of carbon emissions are derived and summarizes the limitations of statistically based knowledge. It concludes with a discussion of what Energy Information Administration (EIA) actually says about the causes of carbon emission reductions in the country over the last three years

It is true, as AWEA notes, that any wind production must displace some existing generation, but only in terms of electricity–not any of the underlying energy forms transposed into electricity. It is rather due to the stricture that supply match perfectly with demand at all times (and this is another oversimplification of a complicated situation).

Just as the grid must reduce supply in precise increments to keep pace with specific reductions in demand—or increase supply in just the right increments to keep pace with increasing demand, the grid must respond to increased wind penetration, which, to a grid operator, looks much like a reduction in demand. Since wind plants are continuously generating between zero and 100% of their rated capacity in flux, providing who-knows-what for any future time, conventional generation must infill any reduction in wind energy at the precise increment of that reduction and, conversely, it must be withdrawn in increments that match any wind increases.

If wind generation were merely intermittent and unpredictable while producing at a steady rate, it might achieve some of its claims about backing down coal. However, wind’s relentless variability imposes daunting challenges for integration. Clever engineering schemes can mask the problem, but not without imposing increased costs and thermal activity.

Any fossil fuel saved when it is sporadically displaced by wind is often consumed in even greater volume as it is called upon to compensate for wind’s relentless skittering—the phenomenon described by Bentek. Wind existentially reduces the efficiency of these compensatory plants, raising the heat rate penalties of older, less efficient coal plants such that they may be forced to emit 40% more CO2 than when operating efficiently. Even efficient penalties of 2% can increase emissions up to 16%.[1] Depending upon the fossil-fired plant involved and the circumstances, a reduction in output in response to the addition of wind “can cause a very small reduction in the efficiency of that fossil-fueled power plant,â€