Forum blows hot over Scarborough wind farm

Posted on May 28, 2010 by energyprbe

Reuben Sokol
The Toronto Observer
May 28, 2010

Opponents of a proposed wind farm off the Scarborough Bluffs have adopted the old Bob Dylan folk classic, with their own spin, as a rallying cry: ‘the answer is not blowing in the wind.’

About 150 residents from the Guildwood area gathered Thursday evening to map out a strategy against the province’s plan to install wind turbines about two kilometres south of the bluffs, in Lake Ontario.

Under the banner of Toronto Wind Action, the group held a forum called ‘Finally the Truth About Turbines’ at Sir Wilfred Laurier Collegiate.

Lawrence Solomon, executive director at the Energy Probe Research Foundation, told the forum that contrary to the position of the United Nations, there is no threat of global warming from fossil fuels and therefore no need for wind energy.

“There is now no shortage of energy … There is limitless natural gas … and there will be no shortage of oil in our lifetime – most of the world is unexplored,” Solomon said.  “Carbon dioxide is a natural part of our biosphere.”

Dr. Robert McMurtry, a professor or surgery at the University of Western Ontario, warned that new rules for locating wind projects should be drawn up and that large windmills should be kept a minimum of two kilometres from residential areas.

He pointed to anecdotal evidence of wind projects disrupting peoples’  health and sleeping patterns.

David Grey Eagle Sanford, a member of the Mohawk tribe who speaks for TWA, said that while evidence of wind power’s effects on human health was unclear, its effect on the health of animals was well known.

“I am a carrier of sacred eagle feathers,” Sanford said. “Hundreds of eagles are killed or disturbed by windmills.”

Sanford conceded that the eagle population has increased over the past 20 years in Ontario due to its protection as an endangered species, but to him every eagle is sacred.

“As one of my elders told me, ‘the eagle is the wind’,” Sanford said.

He then spoke of a dream told to him many years ago by his grandmother: “In the future, they are going to sell you the wind.”

Judy Lipp, the executive director of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative (TREC), which developed a 299 foot windmill in Toronto by Exhibition Place, spoke to the Toronto Observer before the TWA event.

TREC supports  wind energy in Toronto. She said that concern over global climate change justified the need for sustainable energy sources such as wind power; there are no easy choices, she said.

“The impact of a large power plant is much bigger in terms of its footprint on the landscape and we can’t quickly return the land to its original state,” Lipp added.

She added that the large windmill in downtown Toronto,  has not led to any complaints from local residents since it was built eight years ago.

“If you stand under it, you cannot hear anything except the Gardiner Expressway … In an urban environment, ambient noise far overshadows the noise that wind turbines make,” Lipp said.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Renewables | 2 Comments

Green elites meet the people

Posted on May 28, 2010 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
May 28, 2010

On Wednesday evening, as part of a panel of energy insiders, I spoke in Toronto’s financial district before an audience of some 150, most of them professionals interested in the clean-energy industry. On Thursday evening, I spoke to some 300 of their victims, in a school auditorium in a residential neighbourhood 15 miles away.

The elite gathering, held in the Grand Banking Hall of One King West Hotel & Residence, was organized by Corporate Knights, a magazine dedicated to “clean capitalism,” and funded by Enbridge, an $18-billion energy company keen to capture a share of the government-sponsored clean technology business (clean energy is chiefly wind, solar, biomass, and other government-subsidized energy technologies). Geared to making Canada a green-energy superpower, the event was billed as “an evening of constructive dialogue on the economy, energy and the environment,” and that it was. I especially felt constructive in bringing news to the assembly that the prospects for a low-carbon green economy were crumbling. Earlier that day, the EU had announced it was putting further carbon dioxide cuts on hold. Its announcement followed like decisions one day earlier by Germany and France, whose announcements followed blockbuster news from Spain the previous week.

“Spain admits that the green economy as sold to Obama is a disaster,” read the headline in La Gaceta, a Spanish business newspaper that reported a leaked internal Cabinet document in a full-page article (Obama has often cited Spain as a model Green Economy). The Cabinet document indicated that more than two jobs were lost for every green job created, that the country’s spending binge on renewables had made Spain a high-electricity-cost country, and that Spanish businesses now faced electricity costs 17% higher than the European average. Thanks to the green economy, Spain has Europe’s highest unemployment rate, at 20%, and is now staring at bankruptcy.

More constructive news from me: Australia last month abandoned its cap and trade plan, and the U.S. cap and trade plan is going nowhere. In all these countries, the shoddiness of the scientific claims linking man to dangerous climate change has finally been publicized, thanks to the release of the Climategate emails which showed that scientists had cooked the books on climate change. With public belief in man-made global warming tanking around the world, politicians have begun to run for cover. Countries everywhere are bailing out of their CO2-reduction plans.

Except in Canada, where many in the press and public, and especially in the elites, have not yet heard the news. The other panellists on the stage with me Wednesday evening — a vice-president at CIBC who lends money to government-backed clean energy projects; the head of Cleantech at MaRS, a government-funded centre that promotes government funding of technology; and executives at Earnscliffe and Navigant, top consulting companies — all spoke to the ways and means of transforming society. Some touted the moral imperative to combat man-made global warming, some the need to do what’s right for society, some the steps required to ethically build a less consumptive, more ascetic society of the future.

I met some of the residents slated to inhabit the Brave New World of these panellists the following evening, in an iconic area on the outskirts of Toronto known as the Scarborough Bluffs. The water off this stretch of cliff along Lake Ontario is among the many sites slated for industrial wind turbines. To protect this little part of their planet, which ironically had been carved out when global warming ended the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago, residents came out in their hundreds. Some objected to the visual intrusion of 400-foot high windmills in the natural environment, some feared the noise and possible health effects associated with wind turbines, some worried about the wind turbines’ effect on their property values. None understood why the Ontario government was imposing these monstrosities on them, or why it had taken such extraordinary steps to complete the imposition: To see to the construction of wind and other so-called clean technologies, the Ontario government passed legislation to both provide billions in subsidies for technologies without economic merit and to deny communities their traditional rights to control local developments.

The plight of the residents, in fact, has a ready explanation. In part — a lesser part — it stems from the high-sounding rhetoric of the elite panellists, magnified in an echo chamber populated by legions of fellow elites, the overwhelming majority of whom have accepted the global-warming hypothesis unquestioningly, despite an abject paucity of compelling evidence. The other part of the explanation — the greater part — stems from the residents having unquestioningly accepted the same hypothesis. Fortunately, a remedy for the residents, and for the populace at large, is readily available: Follow the rest of the world and challenge the science.

Posted in Energy Probe News, Renewables | Leave a comment

A leaky green economy

Posted on May 27, 2010 by energyprbe

The lure of creating a thriving “green” economy has politicians around the world scrambling to push green policies through their legislatures. But a recent study from California says that the state will suffer job losses, higher-priced goods, lower business profits and reduced income if it goes ahead with its climate policies and other jurisdictions don’t follow suit.

For some industries and firms, the negative impacts from the policies could be significant.

Worse still, the report admits that while the researchers are sure the effect of the climate policies will be negative in the near term, they’re unsure how the policies will play out for the state’s economy in the future—largely because it’s impossible to determine who will follow California’s lead in implementing the policies. If others don’t join in, then California may struggle to keep up.

This means there’s the very real possibility that the supposed “green” economy never materializes, while the state’s traditional industries flee to areas with easier climate-change regulations.

This exile, the researchers say, is known as “economic leakage”. That’s when businesses take their activities to other states and nations that have not yet pursued, or have passed easier, climate policies. The amount of economic leakage could have a major impact on the effect of California’s climate policies, as the more businesses that flee the state, the lower will be the overall reductions in Greenhouse gases.

Read the report here.

Energy Probe is a keen supporter of renewable energy. We believe renewable energy has the ability to diversify our electricity supply, while allowing for more decentralized sources of power for consumers. But we’re not in favour of throwing massive subsides at forms of energy that are not technically or economically feasible.

Read the previous gangrene economy report, "La dolce vita: green and unemployed" here.

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Aldyen Donnelly: The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy has it all wrong

Posted on May 26, 2010 by energyprbe

National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NRTEE) indices, all other things being equal, will systemically rank a nation higher (performing better at de-carbonization) if:

  • its energy and industrial infrastructure was older and higher emitting in the base year, relative to a nation whose capital stock was newer and already lower emitting, per unit of energy and industrial output, in 1990; and
  • the nation has become less energy independent/more dependent on imports since the base year, relative to the nations on which it is becoming increasingly dependent for energy and industrial product supplies; and
  • goods producing jobs are declining as a percentage of total employment in that nation, relative to the nations on which it is becoming increasingly dependent for energy and industrial product supplies; and
  • population growth is low to negative.

The Large Picture: “Pricing Carbon” versus “Reducing Emissions”

It might be just me, but I perceive the role of the NRTEE should be to commission/compile impeccable objective research to inform Parliament and the PMO.

This is not what the NRTEE is now doing.

NRTEE staff appear to have selected a set of climate change policy options, and have now produced three reports that are works of advocacy for those policy options and that lack substantive or useful research findings. They start with solutions, and then set out to develop a methodology to ensure that any “research” results jibe with their proposed solutions.

What is the NRTEE theme? The NRTEE theme is that the primary role of government is to “put a price on carbon.”

What is the problem with this theme?

On page 36 of NRTEE’s “Achieving 2050: A Carbon Pricing Policy for Canada, 2009.  Technical Report”, NRTEE accurately communicates that GHG mitigation and control strategies can cover a spectrum of outcomes ranging from “greater price certainty” to “greater reduction certainty”. With this understanding firmly in place, however, the NRTEE has since focused on making the case for policies that establish greater price certainty—by definition at the expense of emission reduction certainty.

It is reasonable to ask: why is NRTEE favouring price certainty over emission reduction certainty given Canada’s official commitment to cut national GHG emissions, absolutely, 17% from 2005 levels by 2020?

The Role of Government versus the Role of Market Participants

Market participants compete to maintain and grow market shares on two bases only: price and innovation. The appropriate role of government is to regulate product standards to protect the environment, health and safety and to strive to develop product standards that, to the extent possible, leave technology choice to the market place. Then, market participants compete on price and innovation to deliver new products that are compliant with society’s new standards.

If/when a government sets a price—in lieu of prescribing minimum product performance standards—the effect is to reduce the tools available to the market to compete for market share. Minister Prentice and the government of Canada have, to date, legitimately and efficiently pursued product performance standard-type regulatory strategies, in consultation with the US government, i.e. the new CAFE standards for new vehicles.

There are elements we can build into Canada’s new CAFE standards to make the Canadian version more efficient than the US version—delivering a source of competitive advantage to Canadian vehicle manufacturers without breaching WTO or NAFTA conventions—which elements are not built into the current draft Canadian CAFE standard. So there is significant room for improvement.

But there is also time and opportunity to make these improvements. It is too bad, however, that not only does the NRTEE team not recognize these opportunities, the NRTEE  bias has resulted in an NRTEE “research” agenda that makes it impossible for the NRTEE to discover or recommend these easy, significant and non-partisan improvements to existing and proposed regulations.

Lessons Learned from The Leaded Gasoline Case Study

I have previously sent you copies on my short leaded gasoline case study on a number of occasions. This is an important reference, in my view, because:

  • all of the data needed to complete the analysis is agreed and in the public domain
  • it is an opportunity to examine the impact of the coincident promulgation of product performance standards, quota allocation and “cap and trade”-type regulation, and pollution taxes as lead discharge mitigation measures in Canada, the US and Europe.

The leaded gasoline phase out experience has been repeated in numerous other contexts, including the phasing out of PCBs, CFCs, HCFC22 and in US reformulated gasoline, ultra low sulphur diesel and renewable fuel standards. All of these historical experiences clearly illustrate that:

  • markets deliver new products/services compliant with new product performance standards at least cost;
  • attempts to “put a price” on pollution through government taxation always prove inefficient and less effective than product standards;
  • quota-based “cap and trade” regimes—particularly regimes through which quota is allocated based on historical pollution levels—effect a wealth transfer from producers who were more efficient/less polluting prior to the introduction of the quota regime to producers who were least efficient/most polluting before the introduction of regulation.

Unfortunately, the NRTEE models all of these three significantly different measures to have identical environmental outcomes for any given tax/compliance cost. The leaded gasoline and all subsequent real-life experiences, however, clearly show the NRTEE models to be based on false assumptions. The NRTEE models, as designed, cannot identify or explore the very significant differences between the above-listed policy/regulatory options.

How significant is the difference between the these options?

To get the lead out of gasoline, Canada and the US implemented identical gasoline product standards. We got the lead out over a period of real decline in baseline gasoline prices. When both leaded and unleaded gasoline were available in the North American market place, the price differential between unleaded and leaded gasoline peaked at US$0.21/litre and settled (in the last year that leaded fuel could legally be sold) at US$0.02/litre. In other words, the premium that North Americans paid to get the lead out of gasoline was significantly less than US$0.03/litre over a declining base price for gasoline.

These price differentials are significantly lower than the increase in gasoline prices that most “experts” deemed necessary to get the lead out of gasoline prior to the implementation of the phase out in North America. The Retail price of regular leaded gasoline in the US in 1981—the first year of the lead phase out—was US$0.346/litre. The retail price of regular unleaded gasoline in the US in 1990—the last year leaded gasoline could legally be sold in the US by regulation—wasUS$0.306/litre.

This actual and subsequently repeated experience is impossible under the NRTEE modelling exercise. Note that throughout the phase out, in any one year the North American retail price of unleaded gasoline was always higher than the retail price of leaded gasoline. But over the phase out period, the average price consumers paid for all gasoline declined, absolutely, by 12%.  This decline in price reflects real, unfettered price competition in the gasoline market throughout the phase out.

Canada, the US and EU member states initially adopted identical goals of eliminating lead in other-than-specialty market gasoline between 1978 and 1981. Canada, the US and EU member states all set out to phase lead out of gasoline by/before 1990. However, EU member states elected not to regulate a product performance standard for gasoline.

Instead, EU member states jointly agreed to: Introduce a “lead differential tax” to ensure that the retail price of leaded gasoline would always be higher than the retail price of unleaded gasoline. Different member states were permitted to set the lead differential tax at different levels, as long as the resulting retail price of leaded fuel was always higher than the retail price of unleaded fuel.

How did the EU strategy work out?  In the late 1980s, three EU member states adopted Canadian-style product standards after it was apparent that the tax-and-subsidize new industrial infrastructure strategy was not working.  In 1990, the remaining EU member states agreed to aggressively increase lead differential taxes to address their failure to phase lead out by 1990.

But by 2000, leaded gasoline had only been phased out in incremental EU member states that unilaterally decided to introduce Canadian-style product standards sometime between 1990 and 1995.

In late 1990/early 2000, the remaining EU member states met and agreed to introduce an EU-wide Canadian-style gasoline (“petrol”) product standard to ensure that leaded gasoline would be fully phased out by 2006. Three countries–Greece, Italy and Spain–refused to participate in the 2000 EU unleaded product standard, arguing that they could not afford to give up lead differential tax revenues at that time. Leaded petrol is still sold in those three nations today.

Leaded gasoline still dominated European retail supply, notwithstanding the fact that the lead differential tax resulted in a leaded fuel retail price premium of US$1.11/litre in the UK; and over US$0.40/litre in all other states that had not yet implemented a product standard—10 years after North American markets had successfully phased out lead over a period of absolute decline in the market price for all gasoline types.

This fact-based historical experience is an impossible outcome in the NRTEE models.

It is important that instead of denying the relative inefficiency of consumption taxes as product quality management strategies, NRTEE shift to an analytical process that focuses more on explaining why the apparently traditional economic theory that is embedded in NRTEE modelling does not actually prove out in real life.

Please note that per capita demand for transportation fuels grew faster in most EU member states than in Canada and the US over the lead phase out period. So the available facts do not support an argument that EU’s high fuel tax/price policy  held back growth in demand.

Linking the Leaded Gas History to Today’s GHG Control Challenge

I repeat, NRTEE’s current suite of GHG management policy recommendations is closely analogous to the EU strategy for phasing lead out of gasoline, not the proven faster, more efficient, lower cost Canadian and US leaded gasoline phase out strategies.

The table below shows you most recently reported electricity rates in Europe, reflecting—at least in part—the consumers price impact to date of European GHG management strategies. Given the similarity between the EU strategy to reduce lead and the suite of policies adopted to reduce GHGs, should NRTEE not assume that European price impacts are higher than we should accept for efficient Canadian policy?

Given this available data, and our understanding of the very, very different compliance cost/retail price impacts revealed in the Canadian, US and EU leaded gasoline phase out, NRTEE should be noting and asking the following:

  • German households that consumer less than 1,000 kWh of electricity per year currently pay more than 36 euros/kWh for that privilege.  Why has Germany failed to secure an unlimited supply of renewable, low carbon energy at such a high price? What is the policy/regulatory failure in play?
  • German, UK and other EU-based “energy-intensive businesses” (businesses for whom energy costs account for 3% or more of production costs), are exempt from up to 100% of ALL energy taxes (not just carbon taxes). This largely explains the massive differential between household and industrial electricity rates by demand group in the table below. When NRTEE advocates for EU-style policies and measures, is NRTEE actually advocating for the measures that EU nations have implemented—i.e. a massive shift of energy system costs from industrial to small residential customers?

Aldyen Donnelly, May 26, 2010

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Personal radiation protection for pregnant woman

Posted on May 25, 2010 by energyprbe

(May 25, 2010) Belly Armor by RadiaShield was designed to protect a pregnant woman and her child in the womb from electromagnetic radiation emitted from consumer devices such as cell phones, laptops, and microwave ovens. Belly Armor products are made of RadiaShield fabric, a woven fabric made of 82% silver fiber. It works by neutralizing electromagnetic waves.

Continue reading →

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Be prepared for electric shock

Posted on May 25, 2010 by energyprbe

Lisa Grace Marr
The Hamilton Spectator
May 22, 2010

If you haven’t already, you’re about to get a nasty shock when you open your electricity bill.

New time-of-use charges (based on smart meter readings) coupled with an Ontario Energy Board (OEB) increase of $5.78 for Horizon customers (based on average usage and HST) are being loaded onto bills this spring.

"We all know electricity prices are going up," said Shelley Parker, acting director of customer services at Horizon Utilities.

"The thing we are doing is to teach customers how to change their energy practices … if you do change habits, your bill should not change too much."

Horizon did cut its own distribution rate this year by $2 a month for the average customer.

So far, Horizon Utilities has installed 99 per cent of its smart meters although not all are online yet.

It’s costing the utility about $140 to install a smart meter at a home –that works out to about a $3.2-million project.

It’s part of a provincial program which is using smart meters as a way to promote energy conservation (smartmetersontario.ca).

The government is trying to encourage residential consumers to use electricity at off-peak times when commercial usage is lower.

It argues that customers will save money if they turn on their appliances after 9 p.m., for example.

Horizon Utilities suggests that many of its customers will have similar bills.

However, it does acknowledge some customers in Hamilton and St. Catharines may see an increase if they do not adjust their usage patterns to time-of-use peaks.

This is on top of expected rate hikes on Nov. 1 when the OEB is expected to raise electricity rates again to offset the costs of new green technologies and infrastructure and other costs.

In addition, Ontario Power Generation has applied to the OEB for a $2.75 a month rate increase for two years for all Ontario residents. If approved, the new rate would start in January 2011.

Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe, said Ontario consumers should brace themselves — he expects rates will soon double or even triple due to a "misguided attempt to stop climate change."

He argues rates are rising because the government is buying wind and solar power at twice to 10 times market value, investing in nuclear while "scrapping perfectly good coal plants."

"Ontario is following the path of the U.K., where power rates climbed rapidly to combat a presumed climate change," said Solomon. "As a result, millions were thrown into what is known there as ‘fuel poverty,’ making them eligible for relief."

And Tom Cooper, director of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, points out that the new smart meters do not help low-income families who might live in an apartment building equipped with old appliances, an old furnace or old windows.

"We know anecdotally that low-income residents are being impacted by the higher rates," he said.

He said the HST, in effect on July 1, compounds the impact.

Alicia Johnston, a spokesperson for Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, said the government is introducing a new energy, property and sales tax credit to help low- and middle-income families adjust to the harmonized sales tax (HST) and the increase in costs such as electricity.

Eligibility for the credit — a maximum of $900 a year for non-seniors and $1,025 for seniors — will be determined when income taxes are filed. Cheques will then be issued quarterly. The program starts next year.

Posted in Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

It’s the Sun, stupid

Posted on May 25, 2010 by energyprbe

Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
May 22, 2010

Four years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly skeptical that humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were reluctant to go public with their views. Often, they refused to be quoted at all, saying they feared for their funding, or they feared other recriminations from climate scientists in the doomsayer camp. When the skeptics agreed to be quoted at all, they often hedged their statements, to give themselves wiggle room if accused of being a global warming denier. Scant few were outspoken about their skepticism.

No longer.

Scientists, and especially solar scientists, are becoming assertive. Maybe their newfound confidence stems from the Climategate emails, which cast doomsayer-scientists as frauds and diminished their standing within academia. Maybe their confidence stems from the avalanche of errors recently found in the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, destroying its reputation as a gold standard in climate science. Maybe the solar scientists are becoming assertive because the public no longer buys the doomsayer thesis, as seen in public opinion polls throughout the developed world. Whatever it was, solar scientists are increasingly conveying a clear message on the chief cause of climate change: It’s the Sun, Stupid.

Jeff Kuhn, a rising star at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, is one of the most recent scientists to go public, revealing in press releases this month that solar scientists worldwide are on a mission to show that the Sun drives Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who knows the data, I simply can’t accept [the claim that man plays a dominant role in Earth’s climate],” he states.

Kuhn’s team, which includes solar scientists from Stanford University and Brazil as well as from his own institute, last week announced a startling breakthrough — evidence that the Sun does not change much in size, as had previously been believed. This week, in announcing the award of a ¤60,000 Humboldt Prize for Kuhn’s solar excellence, his institute issued a release stating that its research into sunspots “may ultimately help us predict how and when a changing sun affects Earth’s climate.”

Earlier this month, the link between solar activity and climate made headlines throughout Europe after space scientists from the U.K., Germany and South Korea linked the recent paucity of sunspots to the cold weather that Europe has been experiencing. This period of spotlessness, the scientists predicted in a study published in Environmental Research Letters, could augur a repeat of winters comparable to those of the Little Ice Age in the 1600s, during which the Sun was often free of sunspots. By comparing temperatures in Europe since 1659 to highs and lows in solar activity in the same years, the scientists discovered that low solar activity generally corresponded to cold winters. Could this centuries-long link between the Sun and Earth’s climate have been a matter of chance? “There is less than a 1% probability that the result was obtained by chance,” asserts Mike Lockwood of the University of Reading in the U.K., the study’s lead author.

Solar scientists widely consider the link between the Sun and Earth’s climate incontrovertible. When bodies such the IPCC dismiss solar science’s contribution to understanding Earth’s climate out of hand, solar scientists no longer sit on their hands. Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute stated that the IPCC was “probably totally wrong” to dismiss the significance of the sun, which in 2009 would likely have the most spotless days in a century. As for claims from the IPCC and other global warming doomsayers who argue that periods of extreme heat or cold were regional in scope, not global, Svensmark cites the Medieval Warm Period, a prosperous period of very high solar activity around the year 1000: “It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown — a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.”

The Medieval Warm Period, many solar scientists believe, was warmer than today, and the Roman Warm Period, around the time of Christ, was warmer still. Compelling new evidence to support his view came just in March from the Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory at the University of Saskatchewan and Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the authors for the first time document seasonal temperature variations in the North Atlantic over a 2,000-year period, from 360 BC to about 1660 AD. Their technique — involving measurements of oxygen and carbon isotopes captured in mollusk shells — confirmed that the Roman Period was the warmest in the past two millennia.

Among solar scientists, there are a great many theories about how the Sun influences climate. Some will especially point to sunspots, others to the Sun’s magnetic field, others still to the Sun’s influence on cosmic rays which, in turn, affect cloud cover. There is as yet no answer to how the Sun affects Earth’s climate. All that now seems sure is that the Sun does play an outsized role and that the Big Chill on freedom of expression that scientists once faced when discussing global warming is becoming a Big Thaw.

Posted in Climate Change, Energy Probe News | Leave a comment

Be prepared for electric shock

Posted on May 22, 2010 by energyprbe

(May 22, 2010) If you haven’t already, you’re about to get a nasty shock when you open your electricity bill. Continue reading →

Posted in Electricity | Leave a comment

It’s the Sun, stupid

Posted on May 22, 2010 by energyprbe

(May 22, 2010) Four years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly skeptical that humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were reluctant to go public with their views. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change | Leave a comment

Lawrence Solomon: Solar scientists worldwide working to counter global warming hypothesis

Posted on May 19, 2010 by energyprbe

Solar scientists worldwide are working to disprove the hypothesis that man is primarily responsible for climate change, according to Dr. Jeff Kuhn, Associate Director of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. In the view of Dr. Kuhn and other top scientists, the Sun changes Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who knows the data, I simply can’t accept (the claim that man plays a dominant role in Earth’s climate),” he states.

Dr. Kuhn last week announced breakthrough research on the role of the Sun – after years of precise satellite measurements, undistorted by Earth’s stratosphere, he and his team discovered that the Sun did not change much in size, as has generally been believed. Rather, the Sun is surprisingly stable, its diameter changing by less than one part in a million during the last 12 years.

Dr. Kuhn’s team, which includes scientists from Stanford University in California and Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa in Brazil, used  NASA’s SOHO satellite to obtain resolutions 10 times better than telescopes on Earth, allowing them to measure the Sun’s diameter of approximately 865,000 miles to an accuracy of a few hundred feet. In 2017, when the world’s most powerful telescope  — his institute’s Advanced Technology Solar Telescope —  starts operating on Hawaii’s Mt. Haleakala’s summit at a resolution 10 times better still, he expects to zero in on details that unravel the mystery of how minute changes on the Sun’s surface affect climate on Earth. NASA’s SOHO satellite revealed that 100 metre high bumps 90,000 kilometres apart cover the Sun’s surface. With his new telescope, Dr. Kuhn expects to capture never-before-seen details of the solar surface.

“We can’t predict the climate on Earth until we understand these changes on the sun,” concludes Kuhn.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

He can be contacted at: LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, May 19, 2010

 

Posted in Climate Change, The Deniers | 1 Comment