Green Energy -- The Harsh Reality -- March 20, 2018

Updates

Later, 6:34 p.m. Central Time: the Kennedy clan is no doubt getting ready for their fourth family reunion of the winter/spring to celebrate all the snow. Vencore Weather is reporting a major coastal storm with significant impact all along the I-95 corridor.  

Original Post 

This is interesting. When I first started investing in 1984, with an energy- and telecom-weighted portfolio, I always worried that I would not know when to liquidate my energy holdings, expecting that oil and natural gas would come to an end when i was in my early 60's or 70's. Not to worry. It looks like I can hold on to my energy holdings for another 50 years.

But before I get to the article, a screenshot from yesterday's Drudge Report:

Later: now it's in blue on the Drudge Report -- 11:03 a.m.:

From oilprice.com yesterday:

I recently asked a group [most likely millennials] gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world's energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.

Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.

The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide. [And this is after decades of cajoling, fake news, tax credits, incentives, regulations, federal and state mandates.]

The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.

I hadn't included hydroelectricity in my list, I told the group, which would add another 2.5 percent to the renewable energy category. But hydro, I explained, would be growing only very slowly since most of the world's best dam sites have been taken.

The category "Biofuels and waste," which makes up 9.7 percent of the world total, includes small slivers of what we Americans call biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel), I said, but mostly represents the deforestation of the planet through the use of wood for daily fuel in many poor countries, hardly a sustainable practice that warrants vast expansion. (This percentage has been roughly the same since 1973 though the absolute consumption has more than doubled as population has climbed sharply.) 

As if to underline this worrisome state of affairs, the MIT Technology Review just days later published a piece with a rather longish title: "At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system."

In my presentation I had explained to my listeners that renewable energy is not currently displacing fossil fuel capacity, but rather supplementing it. In fact, I related, the U.S. government's own Department of Energy with no sense of alarm whatsoever projects that world fossil fuel consumption will actually rise through 2050. This would represent a climate catastrophe [LOL], I told my audience, and cannot be allowed to happen. [He needs to take a look outside -- see screenshots above -- and quit relying on Algore's PowerPoint presentations.]

And yet, the MIT piece affirms that this is our destination on our current trajectory. The author writes that "even after decades of warnings, policy debates, and clean-energy campaigns—the world has barely even begun to confront the problem."

Much, much more at the link.

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Notes To The Granddaughters

One book today: The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300 - 1850, Brian Fagan, c. 2000

A reminder: due to all the coal-burning Viking ships, the Medieval Warm Period lasted from around 1000 BCE to about 1300 CE.

A major -- get this -- one, single, major volcanic eruption generates a cold snap, 1258 CE.

1450: "greater storminess and unpredictable climatic shifts -- and very, very cold."

1670 - 1710: "the coldest period of the Little Ice Age."

Warming begins about 1850.

Algore notes the warming trend, 1994.

The author: Brian Fagan is a professor of archaeology at UC-Santa Barbara. He is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Archaeology.

Preface:

• people dancing at fairs on a frozen River Thames in London in the jolly days of King Charles II
• legends of George Washington's raging Continental Army wintering over at Valley Forge in 1777 - 1778
• only two centuries ago Europe experienced a cycle of bitterly cold winters, mountain glaciers in the Swiss Alps were lower than in recorded memory; pack ice surrounded Iceland for much of the year
• we live in an era of global warming that has lasted longer than any such period over the past thousand years [we won't mention the medieval warming period here or the era of dinosaurs -- it would not fit the story line]

Part One: Warmth and Its Aftermath

Chapter 1: The Medieval Warm Period, 950 - 1500 -- the story of the Vikings

• 980s: Norse settlement of Greenland
• 1066: William the Conqueror invades England
• late 1100s: cathedral building
• 1200: crusades begin; last for decades
• 1258: large volcanic eruption causes cold summer
• 1300: Hanseatic League rises to prominence
• between 1300 - 1500
• Great Famine (1315 - 1321)
• Black Death (c. 1348)
• Abandonment of Norse Western settlement, Greenland (c. 1350)
• Hundred Years War (1337 - 1483
• wine cultivation abandoned in England

Chapter 2: The Great Famine

• the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)
• trade and geography made Flanders one of the leading commercial centers of 14th century Europe
• 1315: cold weather; crops not harvested; beginning of the Great Famine
• famine lasted for seven years
• the story of medieval farming as much as the weather

Part Two: Cooling Begins

Chapter 3: The Climatic Seesaw

• some experts: 1300 - 1850
• the heavy rains and great famines in 1315 - 1316 marked the beginning of centuries of unpredictability throughout Europe
• other authorities restrict the term "Little Ice Age" to a period of much cooler conditions over much of the world between the late 17th (1680; Industrial Revolution began about 100 years later) centuries to the mid-nineteenth (1850) centuries (right through the Industrial Revolution and into the US Civil War)
• what caused the Little Ice Age? The answer still eludes us -- centuries later [but experts have the current cycle of global warming all figured out, and it's all because of "America," specifically the US and the GOP]

Chapter 4: Storms, Cod, and Doggers

• back to the Vikings, when they first noted the weather change to severe cold and northern ice packs
• Eric the Red, Norse merchant ships (knarrs): most direct route from Iceland to East Greenland, along latitude 65 degrees north, then coasted south and west around Cape Farwell to the Eastern Settlement
• herring fishing
• herring abounded in the North Sea
• Dutch invented the buss, a much larger ship that allowed sailors to stay out at sea for a longer period of time
• Dutch and the Basques: skilled boatbuilders
• a small boat originally used on the Dogger Bank in the southern North Sea and for cod fishing: the dogger
• English were quick to make use of the doggers; the English dogger fleets were so efficient that Iceland's leaders soon complained to their Danish masters that the foreigners were decimating the fish population

Chapter 5: A Vast Peasantry

• village life in medieval France
• by the beginning of the 15th century (1400), the depopulation of the countryside by famine, plague, and war had led to the abandonment of as many as 3,000 villages across France alone
• the recurrent plagues and regular famines kept population in check for generations
• 1430s: a run of exceptionally harsh winters
• 1500s: glacial advance noted
• in 1599 - 1600, the Alpine glaciers pushed downslope more than ever before or since
• 1560 - 1600: throughout Europe, the years were cooler and stormier, with late wine harvests and considerably stronger winds than those of the 20th century
• farming difficult across Europe; farming was just as difficult in the fledgling European colonies in North America

Part Three: The End of the "Full World"

Chapter 6: The Specter of Hunger

• subsistence farming
• the severe weather of the 1590s marked the beginnings of the apogee of the Little Ice Age, a regimen of climatic extremes that would last over two centuries
• 17th century literally began with a bang; between February 16 and March 5, 1600, a spectacular eruption engulfed the 4,800-meter Huanyaputina volcano seventy kilometers east of Arequipa in southern Peru
• the scale of hte Huanyaputina eruption rivaled the Krakatau explosion of 1883 and the Mount Pinatubo event in the Philippines in 1991
• volcanic events produced at least four more major cold episodes during the 17th century, which is remarkable for having at least six climatically significant eruptions; none rivaled summer 1601, but 1641 - 1643; 1666 - 1669; 1675; and 1698- 1699 experienced major cold spikes connected with volcanic activity (note:1666 -- The Plague Year)

Chapter 7: The War Against The Glaciers

• 1680 - 1730: the coldest cycle of the Little Ice Age; temperatures plummeted; the growing season in England was about five weeks shorter than it was during the 20th century's warmest decades
• the winter of 1683 - 1684: particularly cold
• discussion of sunspots
• by any measure, the lack of sunspot activity during the height of the Little Ice Age was remarkable
• the period between 1645 and 1715 was remarkable for the rarity of aurora borealis and aurora australis, which were reported far less frequently than either before or afterward
• between 1645 and 1708, not a single aurora was observed in London's skies
• astronomers F W. G Sporer and E. W Maunder discussed
• glacial "high tide" in the Alps lasted from 1590 to 1850, before the egg began that continues to this day

Chapter 8: "More Like Winter Than Summer"

• "London has never forgotten the summer of 1666." 
• 1666: the Plague Year
• the London fire, September 2, 1666
• the late 17th century brought many severe winters, probably from persistent low NAOs
• the agricultural innovations of the 17th century insulated England from the worst effects of sudden climatic change

Chapter 9: Dearth and Revolution

• the remarkable transformation in English agriculture came during a century of changeable, often cool climate, interspersed with unexpected heat waves
• farms grew larger and more intensive cultivation spread over southern and central Britain
• more deaths came from infectious diseases due to malnutrition and poor sanitation than from hunger
• the importance of the wine industry to track climate change

Chapter 10: The Year Without A Summer

• April 11, 1815: the island of Sumbawa in eastern Java; Mount Tambora, at the northern tip of Sumbawa erupted with catastrophic violence
• volcanologists have fixed the dates of more than 5,560 eruptions since the last Ice Age; Mount Tambora is among the most powerful of them all, given rise the legend of Atlantic
• the ash was 100x that of Mount Saint Helens in Washington State in 1980; exceeded Krakatau in 1883
• the years 1805 to 1820 were for many Europeans the coldest of the Little Ice Age

Chapter 11: An Ghorta Mor

• Ireland, potato, and the Potato Famine
• summer of 1845
• by April, 1846, people were eating their seed potatoes
• 1846: widespread food shortages
• thus, the Little Ice Age ended as it began, with a famine whose memory resonated through generations
• Ireland changed radically as a result

Part Four: The Modern Warm Period

Chapter 12: A Warmer Greenhouse

• just a few short pages
• interesting that the entire book focused on science, nature, climate cycles, sunspots, volcanoes, North Atlantic Oscillation;
• the last few pages focused on climatologist James Hansen's testimony, June 23, 1988, before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee "on a day when the temperature in Washington, DC, reached a sweltering 38 degrees Celsius" [as folks would tell me, that's weather, not climate, and completely irrelevant; what a doofus]

Note:

• El Niño and La Niña are not mentioned in the book (I didn't see this discussed, nor were the words in the index)
• a very Euro-centric focus; not much on North America; nothing on South America, Africa, or Asia, except in passing or to discuss specific volcanic events