Green ‘smart meters’ are plain stupid

Daily Mail

The plan for ‘smart meters’ is one such mistake. Even those who now promote them do not fully understand them. Experience in other countries shows they will not fulfil their optimistic official targets and that they are fraught with risks.

They do not work properly in several types of building. Their complex technology could take years to bed down. Yet the policy is to be implemented anyway, publicised at great expense with a launch event starring Bob Geldof. And we, the actual consumers, will pay for it for many years ahead in higher charges, even if we opt not to have the new equipment in our homes. This is a classic example of starting with a theory and trying to force reality to fit. Similar attitudes led to the sclerosis and ultimate collapse of the old Communist systems, which promised utopia and produced poverty, concrete-headed official obduracy and rust. The Green fashion has gone unchallenged long enough.  It is time for Ministers, MPs and the media to re-examine the claims of a belief system which has so far brought nothing but higher prices, diminished efficiency and ugly blights on the landscape.

Unveiled: New £200 'smart' meters every household must pay for (but may not work)

Daily Mail

A Government plan to put ‘smart meters’ into every British home – costing households £200 each – will be launched this week despite fears they will not work and that they pose a security risk to power supplies.

The £11 billion project, introduced to meet EU green targets, is supposed to cut down energy consumption and reduce bills.

But official reports seen by The Mail on Sunday reveal that: trials show consumers with smart meters save far less energy than predicted; five countries considering such a plan have decided it would cost more money than it saves; the meters do not work in a third of British homes, including high-rise flats, basements and those in rural areas: hackers and cyber-terrorists could break into the system  causing chaos in the national grid, or carry out large-scale fraud by fiddling bills.

Energy companies will begin the mass installation of smart meters next year at a cost of at least £200 per home, and have admitted the expense will be passed on to customers."

It's politics, not science, driving climate mania: Why are environmentalists and scientists so reluctant to discuss long-term increases in southern hemisphere sea ice?

Daily Mail

For years, computer simulations have predicted that sea ice should be disappearing from the Poles.
Now, with the news that Antarctic sea-ice levels have hit new highs, comes yet another mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science. Climatologists base their doom-laden predictions of the Earth’s climate on computer simulations. But these have long been the subject of ridicule because of their stunning failure to predict the pause in warming – nearly 18 years long on some measures – since the turn of the last century. .....

It’s fair to say that this has been something of an embarrassment for climate modellers. But it doesn’t stop there. In recent days a new scandal over the integrity of temperature data has emerged, this time in America, where it has been revealed as much as 40 per cent  of temperature data there are not real thermometer readings. Many temperature stations have closed, but rather than stop recording data from these posts, the authorities have taken the remarkable step of ‘estimating’ temperatures based on the records of surrounding stations.  So vast swathes of the data are actually from ‘zombie’ stations that have long since disappeared.  This is bad enough, but it has also been discovered that the  US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is using estimates even when perfectly good raw data is available to it – and that it has adjusted historical records. Why should it do this? Many have noted that the effect of all these changes is to produce a warmer present and a colder past, with the net result being  the impression of much faster warming."

Global warming computer models confounded as Antarctic sea ice hits new record high with 2.1million square miles more than is usual for time of year

Daily Mail

• Ice is covering 16m sq km, more than 2.1m unusual for time of year
• UN computer models say Antarctic ice should be in decline, not increasing

Nanaimo Hot and Cold Day Histograms – So Much For Extreme Weather

Sunshine Hours
You all know that the AGW cult likes to go on and on about “Extreme Weather” because the warming stopped in 1998 and they like to think the world is coming to an end and only they can save us. Just another end of the world cult.
So I thought I would look at the same data for the weather station closest to my hometown on the west coast of Canada. The data only starts in the late 1940s so there is no extreme’s from the 1930s and 1940s.
One thing to remember. The 2361 Days Over 25C number (for example) includes the 506 Days Over 30C etc.
I don’t see any increase in extreme hot days. I don’t see any increase in extreme cold days.
Aside from 2 hot days in July 2009 (matched by the 3 days in the 1960s) and 1 cold day in 2008 matched by a day in 1968 it seems to have been getting less extreme."

WSJ: Climate of Conformity: One of our writers gets sacked for dissenting on global warming

The Hockey Schtick
Think tanks can support whoever they want, though we thought they were supposed to let people "think." Mr. Rossiter's fate is further evidence of the left's climate of intellectual conformity. If you disagree with the orthodoxy on climate change, you aren't merely wrong, you must be banished from public debate."

Raw Weather Data Destroyed, Lost Forever?…USHCN, NOAA And GHCN “Prime Manipulators”

NoTricksZone
During the search for this data, I came to the conclusion that RAW data simply does not exist for any stations except for the filled-out sheets from COOP stations or the electronic reports from the automated stations. All the on-line data, whether from BEST, NOAA, USHCN, GHCN, GISS, or wherever, has been manipulated in some way. USHCN, NOAA and GHCN seem to be the prime manipulators, filling in missing records with estimates, inventing data for “zombie”stations that won’t die, and “homogenizing”data to supposedly correct for UHI. GISS then takes the GHCN data and adds their own special sauce where they think it is necessary."

Temperature adjustments

Junk Science
Once all the calculating is done, the 2009 study concludes, the new adjusted data suggests that the “trend in maximum temperature is 0.064°C per decade, and the trend in minimum temperature is 0.075°C per decade” for the continental U.S. since 1895. The NCDC folks never rest in their search for greater precision. This year they recalculated the historical temperatures, this time by adjusting data in each of the 344 climate divisions into which the coterminous U.S. is divvied up. They now report a temperature trend of 0.067°C per decade."

Norway To Reap £1.6bn Subsidies From UK Energy Users

NALOPKT
Two Norwegian state-controlled energy companies are in line to receive £1.6bn in subsidies from UK consumers, after deciding to invest £1.5bn in building a wind farm off the coast of Norfolk. ......
The National Audit Office last week criticised the way in which ministers awarded subsidies to Dudgeon and seven other projects, which received contracts early with no competition. The NAO said this could result in “excessive” returns for energy companies and poor value for money for consumers.
The NAO calculates that Dudgeon will receive £1.6bn in subsidy over 15 years – implying it could cost every UK home roughly £1.50 a year on their energy bills."

An expensive way to boil a kettle

Christopher Booker, Telegraph

Driving recently over the Mendips where I live in Somerset, I saw a new wind turbine poking up over the treetops. I was naturally intrigued because a decade ago I chaired a campaign protesting in vain, despite the unanimous support of our local council, against a giant 2 megawatt turbine that now spins 330 feet above the nearby countryside. A closer look revealed that this new windmill was a Canadian-made Endeavor E3120. I was surprised to see that, despite being 120 feet high, its “capacity” is only a mere 50 kilowatts, just a 40th of that of its nearby big brother. Allowing for the intermittency of the wind, this means that its actual output only averages some 13 kilowatts, enough to power just 13 kettles.

So what purpose is served by this mini-monster, which would have cost a minimum of £240,000 to install? The answer, we can see on the Ofgem website, is that it can generate for its owner an income of nearly £24,000 a year, a return of 10 per cent, certainly rather better than the 0.5 per cent interest we get for leaving money in the bank. But only around £6,500 of that is the value of the electricity it feeds to the grid. The remaining £17,500 is what we all pay in “feed-in tariff” subsidies, through our bills.

So the pitiful amount of electricity produced by this windmill, like thousands of others now proliferating over the land, is being subsidised at a rate of 260 per cent: even more than the 200 per cent subsidy we pay for those vast offshore wind farms the Government is desperate to see covering hundreds of square miles of sea around our coasts. Can our wise and clever climate change secretary, Ed Davey, please tell us what other commodity in the history of the world has ever been subsidised to the tune of 260 per cent – just to boil up on average a dozen kettles?

The Imperial President and the Imperious Idiot

WUWT
The issue here is the Imperious Idiot’s asinine proposal to ban the sale of coal and oil, and the Imperial President’s use of executive power to do that."

Practicing the Dark Art of Temperature Trend Adjustment

WUWT
Did Federal Climate Scientists Fudge Temperature Data to Make It Warmer?

Leading German Daily: “Apocalypse Will Not Take Place”…Richard Tol: “97% Consensus Does Not Exist”!

NoTricksZone
The German media are giving time and space to skeptical voices.
The latest is a report appearing in Germany’s print high-profile national daily the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) which features climate economist Richard Tol titled: “The apocalypse won’t take place“.

RSS shows no global warming for 17 years 10 months

WUWT
Key facts about global temperature
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 214 months from September 1996 to June 2014. That is 50.2% of the entire 426-month satellite record.
Ø The fastest measured centennial warming rate was in Central England from 1663-1762, at 0.9 Cº/century – before the industrial revolution. It was not our fault.
Ø The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.
Ø The fastest warming trend lasting ten years or more occurred over the 40 years from 1694-1733 in Central England. It was equivalent to 4.3 Cº per century.
Ø Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to 1.2 Cº per century.
Ø The fastest warming rate lasting ten years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.
Ø In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of the near-term warming trend was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction.
Ø The global warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to 1.4 Cº per century – half of what the IPCC had then predicted.
Ø In 2013 the IPCC’s new mid-range prediction of the near-term warming trend was for warming at a rate equivalent to only 1.7 Cº per century. Even that is exaggerated.
Ø Though the IPCC has cut its near-term warming prediction, it has not cut its high-end business as usual centennial warming prediction of 4.8 Cº warming to 2100.
Ø The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is more than twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than ten years that has been measured since 1950.
Ø The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is almost four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950.
Ø Since 1 January 2001, the dawn of the new millennium, the warming trend on the mean of 5 datasets is nil. No warming for 13 years 5 months.
Ø Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that."

Apollo Astronaut: Climate Alarmism Is the ‘Biggest Fraud in the Field of Science’

CNSNews
"If we go back to the warmist hypothesis - not a theory, but, a hypothesis - they've been saying from the very beginning that carbon dioxide levels are abnormally high, that higher levels of carbon dioxide are bad for humans, and they thought warmer temperatures are bad for our world, and they thought we were able to override natural forces to control the earth's temperature. So, as I've looked into those, that's the problem that I've found, because I didn't find any of those to be correct - and, they certainly were not a theory, it was just their guess at what they wanted to see in the data they were looking at."  ......
Cunningham notes that, while climate alarmists are concerned that the atmosphere currently contains 400 parts per million of CO2, that's only a tenth of the level his spacecraft had to reach before causing concern. In his Apollo craft, an alarm would go off when CO2 reached 4,000 parts per million and, in today's space shuttle, the trigger is 5,000. And, in submarines where crewmen may be on three-month missions, CO2 has to reach 8,000 parts per million before the alarm is activated."