New Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz doesn’t want to spend his
tenure battling over climate science.
“Let me make it very clear that there is
no ambiguity in terms of the scientific basis calling for a prudent response on
climate change,” Moniz told Energy Department employees shortly after his
swearing-in.
“I
am not interested in debating what is not debatable,” Moniz said in his
remarks at the Tuesday ceremony. “There
is plenty to debate as we try and move forward on our climate agenda.”
The comment was part of much wider-ranging remarks,
available here,
on Moniz’s overall agenda.
At least Dr Karl Kruszelnicki was prepared to initially engage
me, pity he failed to answer my question based on his earlier one word answer to my initial statement.
Does Dr Karl honestly think our sun plays no
significant role whatsoever in driving our planets climate?
Obviously, the Mammoth’s didn’t build any Wind Turbines…
A giant meteor was probably responsible for wiping out the
woolly mammoth, scientists believe.
It has long been thought that hunting was the cause of the
creatures’ extinction, but researchers have now revised their opinion.
They believe a huge meteor smashing through the Earth's
atmosphere broke up into ten million tonnes of fiery fragments, scattering over
four continents.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed a
threshold not seen for 3 million years, exceeding 400 parts per million for the
first time since researchers began tracking the data.
The main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming averaged
400.03 parts per million at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaii on May 9, the
agency said yesterday.
The level is considered a landmark by scientists and
environmentalists, who say carbon emissions caused
by burning fossil fuels are warming the planet and must be reined in before
they cause irreversible changes to weather, sea levels and Arctic ice cover.
NOAA’s data stretches back to 1958.
The so called Global
Warming theory is that should Atmospheric CO2 increase (as it is), then so
should the world’s temperature (but it isn’t). The
Global Warming doomsdayers are clearly wrong.
The massive ice floes have also destroyed 12 homes and damaged another 15
in Canada, which boarders Minnesota.
According to emergency officials, a total of seven homes in Ochre Breach
were "literally crushed" by the ice that rose up within minutes
pushed by strong winds, Winnepeg Free Press reports.
A resident caught footage of a wave of ice that creeped off another lake
in Minnesota - as foam froze and was pushed ashore by strong, icy winds.
Billions of needles of ice seemingly crawl up out of the lake and swarm
over the shoreline.
The photo above demonstrates turbine wake turbulence in
large wind farm arrays and why
the potential for wind energy is substantially overestimated by most
sources. The first turbine to catch the
wind will produce appreciable energy, while turbines in its wake, downwind of
that unit, produce exponentially less energy due to air turbulence. The low level fog, known as sea smoke, clearly
shows this and is one of the best photographs ever taken that demonstrates
this effect.
Wind power is intermittent and inefficient. Back in 1919 a smart German physicist named Albert Betz figured out that the most you can possibly get out of Wind Turbine is around 59% of the power in the wind. This is an unassailable bit of physics. Stop whining about it. I'm not going to prove it here but it is not hard to at least understand why we can never convert 100% of the wind's power. In other words, a perfect best-possible Wind Turbine would be able to convert almost 59% of the power in the wind into mechanical rotating power. But we can't achieve perfection. A given Wind Turbine has a "design point" that generally defines its peak efficiency at the wind speed for which the system is designed. At wind speeds above and below the design speed the efficiency is the same or less - maybe much less. If a turbine's best efficiency is 40% at a wind velocity of 10 meters per second it will be 40% only at that wind speed. At all other wind speeds it will be something worse. Wind turbines will generally operate at lower than its best efficiency, because wind speeds are never constant or average. When there is no wind, a turbine’s efficiency is zero.
The European Union's climate change policy is on the brink
of collapse today after MEPs torpedoed Europe's flagship CO2 emissions trading
scheme by voting against a measure to support the price of carbon permits.
