And now brace yourself for an ice age

GasDad

I think you'll find the energy used, was that used to drive the inverter etc.

For a full scale wind farm this simply isn't the case - the electrical overhead of inverters, computer control etc is such a small percentage of the full load that it really doesn't register. The situation for daft little turbines on your house is obviously different.

johntheexpat

I quite like them.  Kind of graceful and relaxing in a technical sort of way.  As for the plumes from coal/nuclear power-stations, now they are a blot on the skyline.  For up to 100 miles radius.  Especially on days of clear blue skies.

Wild Weasel

I don't see anything wrong with it. The bottom line is that 'if the wind don't blow, the windmills don't go'.

And despite what neo-hippys and clueless politicians think, they never will be. Wind farms are a nightmare for the National Grid to integrate as they are totally unreliable. It's like having an expensive car that only works when it feels like it. You'd either get rid or have a reliable vehicle as a back up.

Similarly, the bird shredder's potential energy generation has to be backed 24/7/365 by conventional sources. The coal power stations' furnaces and the big steam turbines of coal and nuclear stations are not things to you can just switch on and off at a whim.

That's terribly wasteful through. These things cost millions and are sat around doing nothing or idlling half the time. It would be far more cost effective to encourage energy efficiency than continue down this costly blind alley.


Great, I'll get a plasma torch & ship them over to you then.

DPinBucks

Yes, but that’s so obvious that it doesn’t need saying. Any journalist trying to make an article out of it must have an axe to grind.I obviously have to repeat: nobody says that wind (plus all the other renewables) will ever be capable of supplying all our needs. The only technology capable of doing that is nuclear. But it’s obvious that we should get our energy where we can. I don’t want to get sidetracked into discussing successive governments’ and single-minded environmentalists’ stupid blindness in not realising that over the past 50 years or so, but the point about renewables is that they can come on-stream in a comparatively short time compared with the massive nuclear programme which we’re going to have to embark on. And, of course, once they‘re there we might as well continue to use them.​
I don’t know how unreliable they are at present, not having seen the figures, but I do know the technology is still not exactly mature. Since when has unreliability been an argument against doing something important? What on Earth makes you think that reliability won’t be improved, just like any other technology you care to name?Well, yes you can. It’s done all the time. You don’t think that all UK power stations are running at full chat 24/7, do you? And a drop in the wind across the Orkneys is just as predictable as the national brew-up during the Corrie commercial break. And there are plenty of techniques for storing power, such as pumped storage. In any case, as I keep saying, some renewables are always there.You always have to have generating power in reserve, on warm and hot standby. You do now, and you will in the future. And you don’t seem to realise that increasing efficiency is only a stop-gap. It buys us time; it does not remove the problem,. And if you think that buying time is good enough, then I refer you back to when exactly the same ideas ruined our energy policy for 50 years. I suggest we don’t do that again.​

GasDad

The main fact that Wild Weasel is missing, is we are likely to have an intelligent grid in the next 10 -15 years.

This will mean when say power falls - through high demand / lack of wind, things like your fridge, electric heating etc, will automatically cut out temporarily. It will also mean the load can be balanced across the whole of Europe / Eurasia.

Wild Weasel

All completely unecessary. Can you even imagine the increased transmission losses on something like that?

GasDad

Err no - 100% necessary. It's a sensible and basic thing to do.

johntheexpat

I see NASA is joining in the conspiracy now:
Past Decade Warmest on Record, NASA Data Shows.

but then is there a better way to get massive financing for a space agency than trying to convince the population that the Earth is screwed and we have to plan for evacuation to other planets?  Obviously of all the scientific institutes involved, NASA probably has the biggest vested interest and its data should be treated accordingly.  

Wild Weasel

Their temperature figures are completely untrustworthy. NASA is as bent as the Met Office and the UEA. The way they cherry pick weather stations in order to perpetuate their Climatology religion is shameless. But then, James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was the guy who invented global warming back in the 1980s.

They've dumped 90% of the US weather stations that used to be used. They now have only FOUR stations to represent the whole of California. One of those is at San Francisco Airport and the other 3 are in the south near LA. They've 'deleted' all the others, including those up in the mountains where it's cooler.

Around the world, they've reduced the number of temperature readings from over 6,000 weather station to less than 1,500. Those dropped from the sample have been overwhelmingly from cooler areas. Canada for instance has over a hundred weather stations above the arctic circle. NOAA/GISS take data from just ONE.

The bottom line is that you can't compare their current figures with those from pre-1990. The whole thing's a joke.

DPinBucks

Global warming has been an issue ever since the greenhouse effect was discovered. It first started to be taken seriously in the 1950s when people realised that CO2 emissions were growing significantly.I'm not sure why you seem to attach significance to weather stations at cooler locations. Are you saying that these places aren't warming as significantly as the warmer ones? What evidence do you have for that? And even if it were only the warmer locations which are warming even more, why is that in itself not cause for concern?What evidence do you have for the reduction in the number of weather stations? Even if it's so, what evidence do you have that, given the orders of magnitude improvements in monitoring, data processing and mathematical techniques since 1990, that reduction significantly skews the comparison? And then even if the comparison is skewed, what evidence do you have, other than a vague paranoia, that the skew exaggerates a warming, as opposed to cooling, trend?