More Green dreams shattered
**Posted by Phineas
Two posts at Watts Up With That bring news that that ought to turn the Gaea-cultists’ sweet dreams into nightmares. First, a study from Civitas in the UK demolishes any idea that wind-power is a practical, economic alternate energy source:
The focus on wind-power, driven by the renewables targets, is preventing Britain from effectively reducing CO2 emissions, while crippling energy users with additional costs, according to a new Civitas report. The report finds that wind-power is unreliable and requires back-up power stations to be available in order to maintain a consistent electricity supply to households and businesses. This means that energy users pay twice: once for the window-dressing of renewables, and again for the fossil fuels that the energy sector continues to rely on. Contrary to the implied message of the Government’s approach, the analysis shows that wind-power is not a low-cost way of reducing emissions.
(Full report here (PDF))
They have to pay lip-service to the idea of reducing CO2 emissions, even though there’s no credible evidence of a man-caused greenhouse effect from CO2, because of the success the Green Statists in and outside of government have had in demonizing a gas that’s essentially plant food. The key takeaways, though, are these: because of the unreliability of wind, conventional power stations have to be kept running on standby to handle those times when the turbines aren’t running, either because there’s no wind, or the wind is blowing too fast. That means costs to the consumer skyrocket, as UK residents are finding out. (And we will, too, if Obama and the Eco-lobby in the US have their way.)
But wait, there’s more! It turns out that wind-turbines actually increase the use of CO2 -spewing fossil fuels:
In a comprehensive quantitative analysis of CO2 emissions and wind-power, Dutch physicist C. le Pair has recently shown that deploying wind turbines on “normal windy days” in the Netherlands actually increased fuel (gas) consumption, rather than saving it, when compared to electricity generation with modern high-efficiency gas turbines. Ironically and paradoxically the use of wind farms therefore actually increased CO2 emissions, compared with using efficient gas-fired combined cycle gas turbines (CCGTs) at full power. [p. 30]
Ooops… 
Second, you know all those fears of “ocean acidification,” the Green Left’s latest environmental bogeyman? Turns out it’s another …say it after me… natural process:
It turns out that far from being a stable pH, spots all over the world are constantly changing. One spot in the ocean varied by an astonishing 1.4 pH units regularly. All our human emissions are projected by models to change the world’s oceans by about 0.3 pH units over the next 90 years, and that’s referred to as “catastrophic”, yet we now know that fish and some calcifying critters adapt naturally to changes far larger than that every year, sometimes in just a month, and in extreme cases, in just a day.
Data was collected by 15 individual SeaFET sensors in seven types of marine habitats. Four sites were fairly stable (1, which includes the open ocean, and also sites 2,3,4) but most of the rest were highly variable (esp site 15 near Italy and 14 near Mexico) . On a monthly scale the pH varies by 0.024 to 1.430 pH units.
The authors draw two conclusions: (1) most non-open ocean sites vary a lot, and (2) and some spots vary so much they reach the “extreme” pH’s forecast for the doomsday future scenarios on a daily (a daily!) basis.
pH varies widely and often, yet life adapts and prospers, in a process that’s gone on for hundreds of millions, if not billions of years. No need to invoke the Demon Man and his evil capitalism to frighten people into obedience and submission to a bunch of liberty and economy-killing transnational bureaucracies.
Though I’m sure they’ll try, anyway.
Keep dreaming, cultists.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)