Let’s just say the proponents of immediate construction of industrial-scale renewable energy generation facilities have a solution in search of a problem.
But based an preliminary findings from sketchy data Nevada lawmakers are pushing eight different bills to encourage the use of “green” energy, Harry Reid is threatening the utility company if it doesn’t buy more “green” energy from his cronies, Obama touts it in his State of the Union speech and liberals everywhere are demanding the immediate cessation of the burning of any and all fossil fuels in the United States. Never mind that there are 1,200 coal-fired plants on the drawing board worldwide.
Now, all of you global warming acolytes, stick your fingers in your ears and chant “la, la, la, I can’t hear you,” because I am about to cite an article in Investor’s Business Daily by Paul Knappenberger, an assistant director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, both of which are dripping in oil money and have chunks of coal where their hearts should be.
Harry Reid tours solar farm in 2010. (AP photo)
Knappenberger says new scientific data suggest the threat posed by human-caused climate change is substantially less than previously claimed. He points to recently published research from a team headed by Dr. Peter Stott, a climate expert from the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Center and previously an author of a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) study that found greenhouse gases could lead to rapid increases in global temperatures.
But Stout’s most recent study found projections of an alarming rise in temperature are inconsistent with past observations of actual conditions.
Knappenberger writes, “When Stott and his colleagues forced the amount of global warming predicted by climate models to equal the amount of warming that has actually been observed, the future temperature rise projected to accompany human greenhouse gas emissions dropped rather substantially. In other words, the better climate models match the past, the less scary the future looks.
“Big surprise: My colleagues and I published the same thing in the scientific literature more than 10 years ago.”
The man from Cato says seven other recent studies have reached similar conclusions.
Knappenberger further notes the planet’s average temperature largely has remained unchanged in 16 years, despite the fact annual GHG emissions increased nearly 50 percent.
So, why are our “leaders” in Washington and Carson City in such a helter-skelter rush to cover the Nevada desert and mountains with acres and acres of solar panels and bird-killing windmills that jack up the price of electricity by as much as 30 percent and are so intermittent the power company must keep quick-start (cheaper to run but expensive to build) natural gas-fired generation idling and polluting for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?
4TH ST8 