Coal generation rising despite global net-zero ambition
Australia generated a quarter of its electricity from solar and wind in 2022, more than double the global average, a think tank says.
Wind and solar are also accelerating worldwide, research released on Wednesday shows, with last year’s global rise in solar generation enough to have met the annual electricity demand of Australia.
The report by independent energy think tank Ember found last year may have been the peak of electricity emissions and the final year of fossil power growth, with clean power forecast to meet all demand growth this year.
But the report also found global coal-fired generation was still rising (up 1.1 per cent) even as wind and solar surged (19 per cent).
The electricity sector, in Australia and worldwide, is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter and must decarbonise if international net zero goals are to be met.
A cleaner power supply is also expected to trigger the electrification of big polluters in heavy industry and transport.
“Tracking progress on how our electricity is generated is critical, as it is not only a huge source of greenhouse gases, it is also needed as an enabler of a cleaner and more efficient energy system overall,” Ember’s chair Baroness Bryony Worthington said.
While 2022 may be seen as the turning point, fossil fuels are still providing the backbone of the electricity system in many large economies including Australia, according to the Global Electricity Review 2023.
However, the carbon intensity fell to a record low in 2022 on record growth in wind and solar, which counted for 12 per cent of the global electricity mix – up from 10 per cent in 2021.
Solar generation rose by almost a quarter (24 per cent), making it the fastest-growing electricity source for 18 years in a row, while wind generation grew by 17 per cent.
Gas power generation eased 0.2 per cent in 2022, falling for the second time in three years as high gas prices continue.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made many governments rethink their plans amid spiking fossil fuel prices and security concerns about relying on fossil fuel imports, but it also accelerated electrification with rising consumer demand for electric cars and heat pumps.
Gas-to-coal switching was limited in 2022 because gas was already mostly more expensive, with only 31 gigawatts of new gas power plants built in 2022, which was the lowest in 18 years.
A gas power phase-down is now within reach for the first time, the report said.
But last year also saw the lowest number of coal plant closures in seven years as countries relied on the fossil fuel to maintain back-up capacity.
Coal power remained the single largest source of electricity, producing more than a third (36 per cent) of global electricity in 2022.
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NOAA Proposes to Ignore Whales Killed by Offshore Wind
The death of numerous whales off New Jersey, mostly humpbacks, deserves a lot of attention. The federal NOAA Fisheries agency is responsible for whales. An outrageous statement by their spokesperson got me to do some research on humpback whale deaths. The evidence appears to suggest that offshore wind development is killing whales by the hundreds.
“NOAA said it has been studying what it calls 'unusual mortality events' involving 174 humpback whales along the East Coast since January 2016," reports The Morning Call. "Agency spokesperson Lauren Gaches said that period pre-dates offshore wind preparation activities in the region."
The humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016. But the claim that this huge jump in mortality predates offshore wind preparation activities is wildly false. In fact, it coincides with the large scale onset of these activities.
To begin with, offshore lease sales really geared up 2015-16, with nine sales off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. These sales generated a lot of activity, including damaging sonar. In fact, 2016 saw the beginning of what are called site characterization surveys. These surveys are licensed by NOAA Fisheries under "Incidental Harassment Authorizations" or IHAs.
There is misleading jargon here. These IHAs are "incidental" to offshore wind development. They are not incidental to the whales. The term “harassment” includes injuring the whales. That is called level A harassment, while level B harassment just causes behavior changes or temporary deafness, which can also be deadly.
NOAA has issued 46 one-year IHAs for offshore wind sites, each authorizing the harassment of numerous whales. Site characterization typically includes use of what I call “machine gun sonar.” This device emits an incredibly loud noise every few seconds, often for hours or days at a time, as it maps the sea floor.
There are lots of ways this sonar blasting can cause whales to die. Simply fleeing the noise could cause ship strikes or fish gear entanglements, the two leading causes of whale deaths. Or the whales could be deafened, to be struck later. Note that defenders of offshore wind often point to ship strikes as somehow showing that sonar is not the culprit. In fact, it is evidence sonar is guilty.
The point is that the huge 2016 jump in annual humpback mortality coincides with the jump in NOAA IHAs. Nor is this just about humpbacks. There are the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, on the verge of extinction. Their precipitous decline also began in 2016.
Clearly we need a moratorium on new IHAs until the safety of the whales can be assured. But "Damn the whales, full speed ahead" is the policy of Biden's NOAA. They now propose to approve yet another New Jersey site survey, just 10 miles off Atlantic City.
The survey area is an incredible 2,300 square miles. Ironically, the project is called Atlantic Shores, which is where all the dead whales are washing up. In fact, this is a renewal of a prior permit. NOAA acts as though nothing has changed, ignoring the horrible New Jersey whale deaths.
NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is taking public comments on this preposterous proposal (details below).
NMFS predicts that a great many marine mammals will be subjected to unsafe levels of survey noise. Here are the staggering numbers by category:
42 Whales
2,534 Dolphins
142 Porpoises
1,472 Seals
"....[O]nly Level B harassment is proposed for authorization, which NMFS expects would be of a lower severity, predominately in the form of avoidance of the sound sources that may cause a temporary abandonment of the location during active source use that may result in a temporary interruption of foraging activities for some species," NOAA's bureaucratic argument reads. "NMFS does not expect that the proposed activity will have long-term or permanent impacts as the acoustic source would be mobile and would leave the area within a specific amount of time for which the animals could return to the area."
In short, these thousands of critters will get the hell out of the way and come home when the survey is over, in a year or so. Apparently NMFS thinks this massive forced relocation is harmless. Here are two harmful possibilities, among many.
First, the site is deliberately in a relatively low ship traffic area, surrounded by high traffic zones. This is one of the busiest ship traffic areas in the world. Being forced to relocate into higher traffic areas is virtually certain to increase the incidence of fatal ship strikes.
Second, moving this many animals into territory already occupied by similar animals should greatly increase the population densities for each species. But the food supply remains the same, which could lead to food scarcity.
The treatment of the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale is especially egregious. NOAA says this: "...the size of the survey area (5,868 km2) in comparison with the entire migratory habitat for the North Atlantic right whale (269,448 km2) is small, representing 2.11 percent of the entire migratory corridor."
Right Whales migrate through the area twice a year, going between offshore Georgia and New England so the "corridor" is indeed large, but this is irrelevant. What is crucial is that the survey area is about 35 miles wide east to west and the migrating whales presently pass through it. Thus the survey has the effect of blocking the migration, or seriously disrupting it.
NOAA maintains this proposed harassment is exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They claim there is "no anticipated serious injury or mortality." They should anticipate a little harder. NEPA requires assessment if injury is reasonably likely. Injury and death certainly are reasonably likely here, to thousands of supposedly protected marine mammals, including the severely endangered Right Whales. More deeply, the Atlantic Shores Wind Project has yet to be approved and may never be. Site surveys should not be authorized until the Project is approved.
Comments should be addressed to Jolie Harrison, Office of Protected Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service. Written comments should be submitted via email to ITP.Potlock@noaa.gov. In the offshore wind stampede Biden's National Marine Fisheries Service has lost sight of its mission to protect marine mammals. Just say no to NOAA.
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Science betrayal
Peter Ridd
There is no surer proof that people are losing faith in the scientific establishment than the recent Rasmussen poll of Americans which found 60 per cent of respondents agreeing that, ‘Climate change has become a religion that “actually has nothing to do with the climate” and is really about power and control”.’ Even 45 per cent of Democrats agreed.
This is a staggering result considering the relentless barrage from almost every major science organisation on earth asserting that climate change is ‘real’ and dangerous. Despite all the indoctrination at universities, all the stories in the media by climate ‘experts’, a solid majority thinks they are being conned.
Why have so many people reached this conclusion?
It is not because the general population has been reading up on the history of climate science. I doubt those 60 per cent of Americans know that the climate was hotter when the Egyptians were building pyramids, that American wildfires burnt a far greater area in the 1930s than in recent decades, or that the Great Barrier Reef has never had more coral.
But they can smell a rat, and they can recognise a high-pressure salesman. The alarmist side has cried ‘Wolf!’ hundreds of times too many, and its treatment of those who dare to dissent only makes the rat smell worse.
The public everywhere realises how strange it is that all the effects of climate change are supposedly terrible – that there is nothing good. Consider somebody gazing out of their window in Montana, onto mounting snow drifts in minus 20°C temperatures – they might think it odd that a couple of degrees warmer could be such a universally bad thing.
But the scientific establishment argues that it will not just get hotter, it will also get colder. Do the institutions honestly expect us not to question the peculiar nature of this argument – however much we would like to believe them because we know we should believe ‘The Science’?
And one does not have to delve too deeply into the institutions’ evidence to see that a lot does not make sense. For example, last month’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report again argued that the world’s coral reefs will lose 90 per cent of their coral with a trivial 1.5°C temperature increase – of which, it claims, we have already experienced more than one degree. But data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science shows that corals at the colder southern end of the Great Barrier Reef will grow at least 30 per cent faster in the event of such a temperature rise. Corals like it hot. Maybe corals living in the planet’s hottest water extremes are in trouble, but surely then, some of the corals in the cooler parts of the world must benefit from a little extra warmth? Not according to the IPCC.
And let us not forget science’s dirty open secret. Detailed checks show that roughly 50 per cent of the recent scientific reports, which have been peer-reviewed, are wrong. It is called the ‘replication crisis’. All the big science institutions have known about it for a decade, but they do not like to talk about it. It is too embarrassing. Perhaps the Australian Academy of Science could write an article to The Spectator Australia explaining the problem and how it proposes to solve it.
What other profession gets it wrong so often? Thank goodness scientists are not airline pilots.
The general distrust of scientists revealed by the Rasmussen poll was most probably turbocharged by the Covid scare, and especially by the manner with which dissenters were treated. For example, those who argued that it was possible the virus originated in the Wuhan virology lab, rather than the city’s wet market, were simply labelled racist. But, of all the huge cities and all the wet markets in all of China, what is the chance that Covid popped up, entirely naturally, exactly where virologists were experimenting with Corona viruses? The answer is very roughly just 10 per cent – at most. There are ten cities in China as big or bigger than Wuhan. It was always a valid question to ask about a lab-leak. Even the CIA has stated that the lab-leak theory is plausible.
But people want to trust science institutions. People want to believe that the Great Barrier Reef is almost doomed, despite the wonderful news about record coral cover. This is because if the reef is not doomed, they must face the possibility of something worse – that they have been deceived by institutions they have always trusted implicitly. Organisations such as the ABC and CSIRO, which we have traditionally put on a pedestal. People cannot handle that thought – not immediately at least – but they come around eventually. The Rasmussen Poll, and those 60 per cent of Americans who see climate change is a religion, proves that.
We must make it possible for people to trust ‘science’ again. But that means it must become trustworthy. So far, the science institutions are still in denial.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/science-betrayal/
**********************************************Australia: State of the Climate 2022
Warming has stopped. For how long? The warmest year so far was 2019. Note that they record temperatures in decades. Differences between individual years are so slight. And note the paucity of figures. That is because the differences are in tenths of one degree, sometimes only hundredths. And the total difference between now and 1910 is tiny
Australia has warmed, on average, by 1.47 ± 0.24 °C since national records began in 1910, with most warming occurring since 1950. Every decade since 1950 has been warmer than preceding decades. The warming in Australia is consistent with global trends, with the degree of warming similar to the overall average across the world’s land areas.
Australia’s warmest year on record was 2019. The eight years from 2013–20 all rank among the 10 warmest years on record. The long-term warming trend means that most years are now warmer than almost any observed during the 20th century.
Warming is observed across Australia in all months with both day and night-time temperatures increasing. This shift is accompanied by an increased number of extreme nationally averaged daily heat events across all months, including a greater frequency of very hot days in summer. For example, 2019 experienced 41 extremely warm days, about triple the highest number in any year prior to 2000. Also in 2019, there were 33 days when national daily average maximum temperatures exceeded 39 °C, a larger number than seen in the 59 years from 1960–2018 combined. Increasing trends in extreme heat are observed at locations across all of Australia. Extreme heat has caused more deaths in Australia than any other natural hazard and has major impacts on ecosystems and infrastructure.
There has also been an increase in the frequency of months that are much warmer than usual. Very high monthly maximum temperatures that occurred nearly 2 per cent of the time in 1960–89 now (2007–21) occur over 11 per cent of the time. This is about a sixfold increase over the period. Very high monthly night-time temperatures, which are also a major contributor to heat stress, occurred nearly 2 per cent of the time in 1960–89 but now occur around 10 per cent of the time.
The frequencies of extremely cold days and nights have declined across Australia. An exception is for extremely cold nights in parts of south-east and south-west Australia, which have seen significant cool season drying, and hence more clear winter nights. This results in colder nights due to increased heat loss from the ground. The frequency of frost in these parts has been relatively unchanged since the 1980s.
http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of-the-climate/australias-changing-climate.shtml
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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