solar

Diego Ortiz, writer for the BBC: He describes "ten simple changes to help save the planet." Most people understand that the world is much better off with fossil fuels than without them. There are some who absolutely want to get rid of fossil fuels. They (from Rome and Potsdam to Hollywood and Sacramento) say that the world can be saved with a few simple changes. For the sake of people everywhere, lets hope that clearer, smarter heads will prevail.

Jon Boone, environmentalist, naturalist, bird and nature artist, wind energy expert: “The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal, and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential. “ William Tucker, lecture Understanding E=MC2

Howard Cork Hayden, Emeritus Physics Professor, University of Connecticut: A generation ago, nobody considered Supercharging stations for battery-powered cars, the idea of which had been abandoned well over a century ago. The problems in 1900 were two: the batteries and the charging system. The problems in 2017 are two: the batteries and the charging system. Before the government provides more financial support to Tesla, it should examine the problems identified here with solar powered charging stations and grid powered charging stations at home. Introducing / forcing a new technology on consumers is far more than building an electric car and developing new batteries.

Jet streams are key to understanding climate change because they both create weather and steer weather around the globe. Unlike global warming, jet streams undeniably cause both extreme heat waves and extreme cold snaps as well as directly causing droughts and floods.

Jet streams cause extreme weather when their waviness increases and causes weather patterns to linger over a region longer than normal. Examinations of the jet stream's cycle of waviness were first published by MIT’s Carl-Gustav Rossby in the 1940s.

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The title of this article asks two questions. The author does not answer either of them. He explains how molecules like CO2 and H2O can (and they do) absorb and re-emit (i.e. scatter) specific wavelengths of infrared radiation (aka IR radiation). He is not wrong about that, but much of what he says is opinion or conjecture, and he leaves out a great deal of factual information that makes the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) narrative to be completely bogus. None of what he says answers these 2 questions. He just dodges them.

For the modern world to continue to advance and maintain regional and global peace, it is necessary to support fossil fuels and nuclear power and avoid dependence on wind and solar schemes.

Viv Forbes, Executive Director of The Saltbush Club, Australia: The Great Generation created our present world and left many useful assets as their monuments. The Green Generation is destroying our future. The way things are heading, the lasting monuments to the Green Generation will be the skeletons of abandoned solar “farms” overgrown by lantana scrub, the concrete foundations of bankrupt wind “farms”, and spider-webs of useless sagging transmission lines and towers.

Bernie Sanders, Democrat candidate for President of the USA 2020: He is determined to stop use of fossil fuels and nuclear and replace them with windmills and solar panels.

John Reilly, Co-Director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change: If solar panels and wind turbines keep getting cheaper, why bother building anything else? Because as we add more solar panels and wind farms, their productivity declines. And while the cost of individual solar panels is low, when there are enough of them, they impose real costs on the rest of the system. This article contains good information about wind, solar and nuclear energy. However, it is based on the premise that use of fossil fuels cause Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming, which will soon be settled that they do not. The literature is full of articles that have good ideas about energy and bad science about the carbon dioxide cycle. Unfortunate. Worth reading for description of wind and solar energy.

Ken Haapala, SEPP, The Science and Environmental Policy Project: Many political leaders and political factions have little or no understanding of the importance of reliable, predictable electricity to modern civilization and economic wellbeing. Without thoroughly demonstrated examples of success, a number of local and national governments have passed laws phasing out electricity generated by fossil fuels based on the belief that wind and solar can replace fossil fuels. This “green dream” may become a nightmare. The fear of catastrophic global warming that is driving this political effort is based on unrealistic computer models that cannot describe what is happening in the current atmosphere, much less able to predict what will occur 30 or 80 years from now. Errors may be buried in tens of thousands of lines of computer code.

U.S. Department of Energy: The evolution of wholesale electricity markets, including the extent to which Federal policy interventions and the changing nature of the electricity fuel mix are challenging the original policy assumptions that shaped the creation of those markets. Markets recognize and compensate reliability, and must evolve to continue to compensatereliability, but more work is needed to address resilience. The biggest contributor to coal and nuclear plant retirements has been the advantaged economics of natural gas-fired generation.