Articles Tagged "Michael J. Economides"

Wind energy is the environmentalists’ great energy hope, but two inconvenient truths seem to come between fantasy and reality.

1. Study after study shows that wherever wind development was put in place, natural gas demand went up and the environmental benefits were the opposite of what the advocates expected.

“Cycling” coal plants to accommodate wind generation makes the plants operate inefficiently, which drives up emissions. Moreover, when they are not operated consistently at their designed temperatures, the variability causes problems with the way they interact with their associated emission control technologies, frequently causing erratic emission behavior that can last for several hours before control is regained. Ironically, using wind to a degree that forces utilities to temporarily reduce their coal generation results in greater SO2, NOX and CO2 than would have occurred if less wind energy was generated and coal generation was not impacted.”

This is part 2 of this article Part 1 was published on October 13.

The stories of a warming world continued into the late 1950s as the media inertia plowed forward adding to the warming stories of the 1930s and 40s. The Atlantic Ocean had been warming since the mid 1920s. This warming was keeping the arctic milder by pumping warmer water northward trough the Gulf Stream . On February 15, 1959 the New York Times reported “Arctic findings in particular support theory of rising global temperatures.” However the temperature of the earth was not warming, it was falling. The massive and dominant Pacific had been cooler since the mid 1940s and would continue to be so into the mid 1970s. Climate data show that starting in the mid-1940s the earth began a multi-decadal cooling trend. Around 1960 the Atlantic began to cool again. Now both oceans were in their cooler phase. The two oceans were working in tandem to chill the planet. It was not until later in the 1960s that the media began to really notice.

HOUSTON, TX, Oct. 20, 2010/ Troy Media/ – Warnings of global warming have been with us now for two decades, courtesy of the news media. And surely these respected and long-lived newspapers, magazines and television networks can be trusted to tell us what the current state of the climate is and what it will do?

A least one would think so.

Interestingly, the history of climate reporting is not unlike the reporting of so many other doomsday scenarios, from the “population bomb” which should have caused the death of two billion people by the 1980s, to aids which should have infected the majority of Americans by 2000, to the Y2K disaster that never came to be.

Could be a comedy routine

A careful look back at the history of climate stories in the media presents the re-occurrence of a remarkably consistent theme. It borders on a comedy routine, had it not had such a massive public impact during the last few years.

All of the recent media reports of unrelenting global warming and its dire consequences are in fact old news, a mere regurgitation of decades old stories. As the global temperature has cycled over the last 115 years from cold to warm to cold to warm again, the media has simply been following in almost lock step with it. In fact, media cycles of climate doom, which mirror the climate cycles themselves, have roughly a 10- to 15-year time lag. It seems whenever the world warms up, the number of global warming stories increases to match the trend; conversely when the climate cools down, the media pull up on their long johns and warn of the next ice age.

Click source to read FULL report from Art Horn and Michael J. Economides

In the wake of Climategate, Chinese climate researchers have been looking for a way forward. For the past few years, the Chinese government has been supportive of the “consensus” western position on climate change. Wanting very much to be liked and accepted internationally, China went along with the climate change predictions being put forward by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They publicly agreed with the potential dangers posed by climate change while all along making it clear that they would not accept any mandatory limits on their carbon dioxide emissions.

"Curiouser and curiouser", said Alice. Not an unnatural response to the wholesale departure from reality she experienced at the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. And we have precisely the same head-scratching response to the refusal of green ideologues to grasp the energy realities of our age, especially as they affect a realistic role for renewable energy sources.

The Green Gospel

If any group has set the agenda for Green-ism in our age, it is Greenpeace. In 2007 Greenpeace produced a film ‘The Convenient Solution', which succinctly put the case for renewable energy's ‘urgent' solution before the world. Introducing the film on their website Greenpeace makes this statement, "We all know that, to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels". Within minutes of the film getting under way we are informed of the "unnecessary dependence on fossil fuels." What the Green gospel also says "we all know..." is that: mankind burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide, a ‘polluting' greenhouse gas that significantly contributes to (anthropogenic) global warming. Thus, if we don't quickly change our evil, fossil burning ways dire prognostications will soon befall us.

The alliance between politicians, their supporters with agendas and the news media is an unholy union, one that does not need elaborate conspiracies to consummate. Hysteria and alarmism in the news is a business-driven matrimony and, in spite of proclamations of safeguarding the public's right to know, it has little to do with knowing the truth.

For us westerners our press was supposed to be one of the main institutions that separated us from the rest of the world, made us be smug about the superiority of our political system. It was supposed to be different from totalitarian regimes where the press expresses no opinions other than the party line. Our newspapers and TV were supposed to be unbiased and objective.

But the situation today has become pitiful. It may be because of the evolution of the internet and the collapse of the traditional press; it may also be because pop culture has changed and the press is feeding on it. As William Allen White, the father of the American regional newspaper once said: "a newspaper is as good as the community it serves."