Green Jobs and Energy

What are green jobs, and how does energy production tie in? The current thinking among the Carbon is Killing Us Crowd, those who devoutly believe that CO2 in the atmosphere is already causing catastrophic world-wide changes, is that green jobs derive from reducing or eliminating a fossil-fuel economy in favor of increasing a renewable energy-driven economy.

As one example, in California, the Air Resources Board (ARB) states that job losses in low-intensity industries will be more than offset by job gains in high-intensity industries. Their definition of "job intensity" is such that a major power plant that burns natural gas (and has few employees per unit of production, kWh electricty) has a very low job intensity. In contrast, a wind power farm with hundreds of windmills has a high job intensity due to the greater number of employees required to service and repair the windmills. This is a two-fer for the greenies, as evil carbon is not emitted, and more people have a job.

Yet, just a few decades ago, it was patently obvious that high labor cost was a hindrance to economic efficiency. To name just a few fields, bookkeepers were quite common before the computer age, but automation now does the job. Automated factories require far fewer employees than did the older, manually operated factories.

The green power revolution is said to cut jobs in traditional, fossil-fuel plants, and create many times the jobs in the green collar field.

This week saw a major announcement of job losses in the fossil-fuel plants, as Sunoco announced the closing of an oil refinery in New Jersey with the loss of 400 permanent jobs and hundreds more independent contractors. Should we wait to see the announcement of what, 3 times that number of green jobs? That would be roughly 1500 to 2000 more green jobs if the greenies' jobs-math is correct. One must wonder (as I certainly do) just how long is required for those 1500 to 2000 new green jobs to appear, and those displaced workers have steady paychecks again. Will that be by Christmas, so everyone has a merry Christmas? I doubt it.

The closure of the Sunoco refinery also plays into the Grand Game - the world-wide competition to provide energy. New refineries are under construction world-wide, and a couple of major expansions are underway in the U.S. India started up a very large refinery almost a year ago, and is exporting the products, some of which are imported by the U.S. Excess refining capacity drives down the price of petroleum products - this is basic economics - and that encourages greater consumption. More and more refineries will close, especially those that are smaller and inefficient compared to the larger and modern refineries.

As petroleum prices decrease, the economic incentives for renewable power plants also decrease. Hybrid electric, and pure electric vehicles have an initial cost premium that is supposed to be offset by the fuel savings - but only if petroleum fuels are sufficiently costly. At this time, the additional $3 to $4 thousand premium for a hybrid vehicle is simply not a wise investment.

Obama's Cash for Clunkers program accelerated the purchase - distorted the market - of high-miles-per-gallon vehicles and the (literal) destruction of older, gas guzzling cars. Thus, the demand for gasoline is lower than it otherwise would be, the gasoline price is also lower, and refineries in the U.S. are shutting down. Yet, now the automotive companies see fewer customers following the Cash for Clunkers fiasco, as a person with a new car will not likely set foot in a car dealership for several years.

And so it goes in the Grand Game. Hybrid cars that are not worth the price, oil refineries shutting down, fossil-fuel workers out of work, renewable power plants stagnating due to low economic incentives, and oh yes, crops barely beating the killing freeze this year to provide raw material for the bio-fuels industry. Who knows what the summer of 2010 will bring in that arena.

One wonders if the farmers will be asked to hire more workers as green jobs, and park the tractor in the barn. We tried that for centuries, using manual labor on farms. Those are exhausting, monotonous jobs that paid very low wages. Still, they are green jobs. There are approximately 700 newly-jobless workers in the New Jersey area. Does anyone think that farmers will hire any of them?

Dilute Energy Sources

A thread on WattsUpWithThat.com strayed onto nuclear power the other day, and I offered a few comments. This seems appropriate to reproduce them here, with additional comments added.

As some may remember from the 1960s an old saying "What if they gave a War, and nobody came?" Today, we can rephrase that for the South Texas Nuclear Project's proposed expansion as "What if they wanted to build a new nuclear power plant, and nobody invested?" The city of San Antonio is scheduled to vote on their level of participation in the STNP expansion, with the date presently set for October 13. This date keeps getting pushed back, so we shall see. The topic is wildly controversial, with very few people trusting or believing the nuclear advocates who insist that the plant can be built for only $13 billion, and be producing power four years after start of construction. My assessment, published in comments to various articles at mysanantonio.com, is that the expansion will cost at least $22 billion, and require 10 years or more to produce power. It is more likely to cost $25 billion.

As background, the City of San Antonio already owns 40 percent of the existing twin-reactor STNP, with the City of Austin owning 20 percent. It is quite instructive that the City of Austin this time declined to be a party to the STNP expansion. Austin learned its lesson quite well in the original fiasco, in which the nuclear proponents for STNP stated the plant would only cost $900 million, yet its final cost was $5.4 billion, for a cost over-run of $4.5 billion or six times the original estimate. There is no recent experience in the United States, but the new Generation III nuclear plant presently being built in Finland is billions of Euros over-budget, and so far behind schedule (it was to be started up by now, 2009), that the builder cannot provide an end date to the construction at this time. What an industry - who can trust the promoters? Their track record is horrendous.

The exchange of comments on the WUWT thread is shown below.

A commenter (beng) wrote the following. My response is below that.

(beng) : "Sorry, WUWT, for being OT.

Roger Sowell, the present state of nuclear power development is similar to objective climate research — they have been and are presently mostly dead-in-the-water in the US. Environmentalism and litigation have done their jobs very well over the decades.

If the US had maintained its can-do attitude, we would already have safe and proliferation-proof nuclear plants reprocessing their own fuel. The US is now falling behind the progressive (non-European) countries in science and technology development in general. Space exploration has been the exception, but now even that is at risk.

Sorry, but “renewable” energy sources are and will always be bit players in the big view. It’s a basic thermodynamic thing — low-density energy sources (wind, solar, even hydro) can never replace high-density sources like fossil fuels and especially nuclear (very high density). Unless we want to return to an 18th century society."

4102009

Roger Sowell (13:19:30) :

beng,

What a pessimistic viewpoint!

The reality is that renewable energy sources are now major players, as designed. The incubation and encouragement of innovation via government assistance has provided economically viable renewable power generation plants. Although the Road Not Taken argument makes it impossible to know where we would be today if not for the government assistance, the fact is that we do have viable solar power, viable wind power, viable geothermal power, and very promising wave power. Ocean current power is the next big thing, and it needs zero storage.

For California, only because I live here and am familiar with these numbers, in 2008 (source and percent of total state power generation):

Natural Gas 46.5%
Nuclear 14.9%
Large Hydro 9.6%
Coal (out of state) 15.5%
Renewable 13.5%

Renewables provided more than large hydro, and almost as much as nuclear in that year. As renewables continue to grow, and coal is eliminated, it will soon be the second largest power source. That is hardly a “bit player.”

The horrible realities of nuclear energy (outrageous cost, toxic byproducts that endure for centuries, among others) spurred development of renewables also.

The US government has very recently increased emphasis on offshore renewables development in wind, wave, and ocean current. Other countries also are developing their offshore renewable resources.

http://sowellslawblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/renewables-in-outer-continental-shelf.html

The thermodynamic argument is laughable! A dilute resource is just as viable as a concentrated resource. By your argument, sunshine is not viable because it is so dilute. Yet billions of plant leaves silently refute your argument every day, and have done so for billions of years. By extension, water vapor is not a viable energy source because it is spread out across the entire atmosphere. Yet thousands of hydroelectric plants give mute testimony that such a dilute resource (in the form of rainfall) is perfectly capable of providing economic energy. And, before hydroelectric plants were built, waterwheels provided power for centuries.

Thermodynamics has a place in the debate, but not where you seek to place it. A far better argument is one of economics. If I can build a windmill (taking advantage of that highly dilute resource, wind) and provide power at a lower cost than the highest alternative resource (e.g. a new nuclear power plant or a gas-fired peaker plant), then that is all that matters. Perhaps I tie the windmill to a water source, and use the windmill to pump water uphill into a hydroelectric plant, rather than direct generation of power. In this manner, I obtain a time-shifting of the power in the wind, and I do not care that the wind blows mostly at night while my electric demand is during the day. Thermodynamics has absolutely nothing to do with that aspect, simply economics does.

As to the US and its can-do attitude, it of course still exists. What we learned in the 60s and later the 70s is that radioactivity is too deadly to ever be widely implemented except under very carefully regulated and monitored conditions. There is a reason that children should not play with firearms, and there is a similar reason why nuclear fission processes are heavily regulated. If that increases the cost of building a power plant, and the time required to build it according to the laws, then so be it.

As I have stated before, if you do not like the existing laws, you are welcome to change them. This is the USA. We have in place procedures to do exactly that. Good luck to you.

A bit earlier in the comments, "crosspatch" offered that the modern Generation III nuclear power plants are much less costly due to a simpler design, which uses what he referred to as "the same technology that makes toilets work" or float valves. That hardly gives one a good feeling that the plant will actually operate safely. Float valves are notoriously unreliable - has anyone ever had to repair one of these on a toilet? Here is crosspatch's comment, and my reply.

crosspatch (10:21:32) :

"You might want to recognize a few facts about the US nuclear power industry’s abysmal record of building power plants on schedule and on-budget. Cost overruns of 5 or even 6" [this is crosspatch quoting what I had written earlier - RES]

[crosspatch's statement here] There has not been a single nuclear plant started in the US that I know of since 1979. Your figures are sheer propaganda and not related to any reality. Today’s plants are MUCH simpler to build than those plants were. China has ordered 200 of the AP series plants from Westinghouse.

Two of the drivers of plant construction costs are the cost of financing during the construction phase and the substantial amount of skilled-craft-labor hours needed on site during construction. The AP1000™ technique of modularization of plant construction mitigates both of these drivers.

Overnight construction costs
The AP1000 was designed to reduce capital costs and to be economically competitive with contemporary fossil-fueled plants. The amount of safety-grade equipment required is greatly reduced by using the passive safety system design. Consequently, less Seismic Category I building volume is required to house the safety equipment (approximately 45 percent less than a typical reactor). Modular construction design further reduces cost and shortens the construction schedule. Using advanced computer modeling capabilities, Westinghouse is able to optimize, choreograph and simulate the construction plan. The result is very high confidence in the construction schedule.

…

Simplification was a major design objective for the AP1000. The simplified plant design includes overall safety systems, normal operating systems, the control room, construction techniques, and instrumentation and control systems. The result is a plant that is easier and less expensive to build, operate and maintain.

The AP1000 design saves money and time with an accelerated construction time period of approximately 36 months, from the pouring of first concrete to the loading of fuel. Also, the innovative AP1000 features:

* 50% fewer safety-related valves
* 80% less safety-related piping
* 85% less control cable
* 35% fewer pumps
* 45% less seismic building volume

With so many of these plants currently being built worldwide, the construction has been modularized and the process refined so that they go in quickly. The plant design has eliminated much of the complexity of older designs. Passive emergency systems means they work without having to be activated by a computer or a person and can not be accidentally deactivated by a computer or a person.

To greatly simplify, it works like this:

If the pool surrounding the reactor core begins to heat, water evaporates. It condenses on the inside of the containment vessel and the water returns to a reservoir. When the water level in the pool drops to a certain level, float valves operate allowing water from the reservoir to flow and replace the water lost in the pool due to evaporation. Basically the same technology that makes toilets work. This can continue for two weeks worst case (longer in winter when the containment dome can shed heat to the outside air) without any pumps, external power, HVAC, anything. At the end of that period, cooling water sprayed on the containment vessel (fire hose) will allow operation indefinitely.

But in any case, you cost overrun argument is silly as there is not a single modern plant to which that argument can be applied in the US.

Also, much of the additional cost is due to “lawfare” applied by misguided, uneducated, fear mongering groups who would want to scare the living crap out of people about nuclear power. They have convinced a great portion of California that nuclear plants are unsafe in seismic areas, for example. We have reactors capable of surviving greater seismic loads than Earth can dish out. What is the equivalent seismic load of a depth charge going off next to a submarine hull?

The anti-nuclear movement is based on ignorance and works by stoking irrational fear in people. The only legitimate concern is spent fuel. If you reprocess that fuel on-site, that concern is gone, too. That is why China is doing it, India is doing it, France is doing it, Japan is doing it, and Germany will now likely be doing it. The entire world EXCEPT the US will be generating carbon-free power in huge quantity while we base our energy policy on rainbows, unicorns, and technology that might be here someday.

It is idiotic.

3102009

Roger Sowell (12:26:12) :

Crosspatch, and Mike Borgelt,

Those are the same tired (and untrue, ultimately) arguments the nuclear industry made 40 years ago — and look where we ended up. “We have a good design,” and “these plants are inherently safe,” and “we know how to build these plants.”

Sure you have, and sure they are, and sure you do. [sarc off] You cannot kid me, crosspatch, because I have worked all across this globe building and running process plants, refineries, chemical plants, and power plants. You can probably sell that propaganda to the gullible, non-technical public, but not to me nor any of my colleagues. We know better.

But the arguments at this point are futile. I will be accepting the apologies of all the nuclear nuts, after a so-called Generation III nuclear power plant is built here, in the US, not in other countries. The cost overruns and schedule delays will be public record. The higher cost of electricity will be common knowledge. (on second thought, nuclear nuts will likely not apologize, but instead will make perpetual excuses how it was not their fault, if only the environmentalists and their lawyers had stepped aside none of the cost overruns would have happened).

The nuclear power industry has always had rose-colored glasses, in a hopeless dream to build the most expensive, toxic legacy-creating, misguided form of power man has ever devised. The retail power price increases due to massive cost overruns will harm the poor and those on fixed incomes, and it will be those people who share your misguided optimism who are squarely to blame.

One last point, and that is end-of-life-cycle increased accidents. The existing nuclear power plants are entering the final phase of their operating lives, and they will (because they must) experience increased system failures and radiation emissions. This has already begun as pressures exist to maintain or increase operating rates, systems and pipes corrode, tritium leaks into groundwater, and other systems slowly fail over time.

With at least 50 nuclear power plants older than the average (in the US), the odds are increasing with every passing day that an accident that releases deadly radioactivity will happen. This is not good for your cause.

3102009

Roger Sowell (13:47:09) :

crosspatch, I respect your writings on WUWT, as you usually have interesting and (mostly) accurate things to say. But this time, IMHO, you fell quite a bit short of that mark.

Do you really want to hinge your argument for nuclear power plant safety on float valves, the “technology that makes toilets work?” I suppose toilet float valves work with close to 100 percent success somewhere in the universe, but not on this planet. Even a 99.9 percent success rate is not good enough for a nuclear power plant. That missing 0.1 percent represents 0.36 days, or roughly 8 hours of each year when the float valve will not work. Not nearly good enough.

I have spent too many hours fixing faulty float valve systems on toilets for that to be a convincing argument. I suppose next you will tell us that these are nuclear-grade float valves, not the cheap junk that are installed in actual toilets. Still, a float valve is one of the LEAST reliable of all instrumented control systems, and I have seen thousands of these in industrial (e.g.non-toilet) applications in my career. Their failure rates are legendary.

For just a partial list of float valve failure mechanisms, consider that float valves stick open, stick closed, stick partially closed, they corrode, they rust, they bend, they spring a leak and fill with fluid (water), the hinges freeze, and many, many others.

Thanks for the laugh on that one, I will be sure to include it in my presentations in the future! I think a bumper sticker is also in order.

“Don’t worry folks! These new nuclear plants are SAFE!!! We use the same float valve technology that makes your toilets work!!”

And a few final comments from me. The entire concept of allowing water to vaporize (boil) to prevent a runaway nuclear reaction from exploding or melting down has several problems. First, the amount of water that must be boiled then condensed is immense. Consider that a nuclear reactor produces approximately 3 times the amount of heat compared to the amount of electricity produced. Thus, for a 1250 MWe reactor/power plant, the nuclear reactor side is producing the equivalent of 3,750 MWe of heat.

The heat transfer surface (interior of the reactor dome, as offered by crosspatch) that is required to condense this amount of water would be absolutely immense. Further, the design apparently has the heat being transferred across a very thick wall of steel, then to the ambient air (hence the reference to better heat removal during winter, and it can be continued indefinitely by shooting water on the outside of the containment dome).

Finally, heat transfer to air has a very low "efficiency" or what is referred to technically as the heat-transfer coefficient. In practice, that means that a very large surface area is required to transfer the heat to the air. The smooth exterior of the containment vessel just does not have the surface area.

I do hope that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is competent at performing the necessary heat transfer calculations, and uses the appropriate heat-transfer coefficients. These new reactor designs are a disaster just waiting to happen.

Dumb Move by GM to End Saturn

"GM CEO Fritz Henderson said in [a] statement that Saturn and its dealership network will be phased out [following breakdown of talks to acquire Saturn by Penske]." [words in brackets my addition - RES] source: the Associated Press, September 30, 2009.

This has to go down in history as one of the dumbest business moves of all time. Shutting down Saturn, the car company that rescued GM a decade ago. Saturn, the car company that revolutionized the car buying experience - no haggling on the price. Everybody pays the same for a given model. Saturn, the car that runs and runs and runs, dependably, reliably, and with very low maintenance. Saturn, the car that tow-truck drivers almost never had to tow.

I have owned 3 different Saturns, all 4 door sedans with the 4 cylinder engine, all manual transmission, and they ran like the fine machines they are. Never any maintenance or engine problems. Easy to work on, to change the oil and filter, to change the spark plugs, and that is all the tuneup they required.

Brilliant, GM. Just brilliant. No wonder your company is bankrupt.

Oil in Abundance

Some fear-mongers drone on and on that oil is a scarce resource and that Peak Oil has happened. They view the rapid consumption of oil as a very bad thing, and spin fantasies about apocalyptic events created by a shortage of oil, such events due to happen any day now. Or perhaps next year. Or, really no later than about 20 years. They are quite interesting, these Peak Oilers. Their views are so optimistic in one sense, yet so pessimistic in another.

The optimism, and this is misplaced in my view, is that Man can and will develop sufficient green energy supplies - not based on fossil fuels - to keep every energy demand satisfied without oil, whether for transportation, heating, cooling, industry, entertainment, military, or otherwise. The green energy revolution they insist will be found does not emit carbon dioxide or other killer greenhouse gases, (although there is absolutely no proof that such emissions kill anything), instead, these green energy sources use the sun, the wind, the tide, plant material, even animal fats to produce vast amounts of energy. The technologies for the green energy are being frantically pursued by the laboratories, the scientists, engineers, financiers, and governments. Yet, to date, only small amounts of energy are produced from this massive effort.

The Peak Oilers' pessimism is for the ability of the earth to provide more oil, and for those in the oil business to find and produce that oil. Apparently, in the minds of the Peak Oilers, only those in the green energy field are smart, and those in the oil business are not too bright. Yet, history shows just the opposite to be true. Consider the efforts of Occidental Petroleum very recently.

Oxy, as it is commonly called, found a large amount of oil in California's Kern County, a place that was known for oil but was thought to contain no significant additional quantities. In fact, a refinery that processed local crudes in that area was to be shut down due to lack of crude supplies and imminent financial losses. The refiner, Shell, was not allowed to shut the refinery down but was forced to find a buyer, which they did. The buyer soon filed for bankruptcy.

A key element of Oxy's Kern County find, according to some sources, was the technology they used to evaluate the rocks deep in the earth without drilling. This takes considerable technology, involving seismic surveys, and computer analysis of the seismic results. If one has seen the movie Jurassic Park, a movie director's version of this is included where the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur deep in the ground is discovered by a computer that analyzes seismic waves. Oxy declines to discuss their technology because that is an important competitive advantage in a very competitive industry.

Yet, we can surmise how this technology works. There are two components, improved imaging, and identifying the images. Seismic waves are sound waves produced from a sharp and very loud noise at the surface, then reflected upward by rocks deep underground. Different types of rocks, and different shapes of rocks, reflect the sound waves in different ways. The key is to have multiple sensitive microphones at key locations, listening for and recording the reflected sound waves. The phenomena is very much like an echo canyon, where a person can shout a short phrase, wait a second or so, and hear the sound echo back. A computer then assembles all the recorded sound waves, and processes them for issues such as time delay until returning to the surface, and strength. The exact interpretation process is proprietary because so much value lies in these computer programs.

The second issue is identifying the images. With a sufficiently large pool of data, one can label the images as to being a particular type of rock, its location, and whether there is likely to be oil or not. This data is obtained by actually drilling, and carefully recording the contents of the rock cuttings as the well progresses downward. What is actually discovered is compared to the computer images, and statistics are brought in to play. The geologists are also consulted, as they play a key role in understanding what rocks are where, and how old they are, and whether they are likely to contain oil or not. The Peak Oilers apparently do not understand much, if any, of this entire process, but instead hold the wrong view that oil companies are a bunch of brainless bumblers who haul a drilling rig out into a wasteland, then drill like mad, hoping to find oil. That may have been true in the early days of oil discovery, but no more.

So, congratulations to Oxy. Well done, guys and gals. One can only wonder how many additional oil discoveries will be made, using the high technologies of the modern oil company.

It helps, of course, to have the price of oil above $70 per barrel. OPEC has fumbled yet again, just as they did in the late 1970's with their sudden and dramatic price increase for oil. With oil at $70 per barrel, it makes economic sense to re-evaluate old oil fields, deeper drilling, and more seismic surveys.

Sea Level Silliness

We hear repeated bleatings from the Carbon is Killing Us crowd, the AGW true-believers, that the sea levels will rise and coral reefs around the world will die. What utter silliness.

We know that the seas rose many meters just after the most recent ice age, most likely on the order of 300 to 400 feet. Coral reefs did not die during the ice age, nor did they die during the ice melting period with the sea levels rising. As discussed elsewhere, several times during the past 12,000 years, the rate of sea level increase was much higher than that of today.

Coral reefs are darlings of the tree-huggers because they support a variety of sea life, and they look pretty in photographs. It is also fun to fly to a tropical paradise, don the snorkel, face mask, and swim fins, and swim around near a tropical coral reef.

So, who are we going to believe, the obvious facts staring us in the face, or the gloom-and-doom AGW Carbon is Killing Us crowd?

Zero Cost LNG

Can LNG, even after re-gasification and compression into distribution pipelines, ever be considered to have a zero cost? The answer is very, very close to yes, but only if one uses the same idiotic rationale as does the nuclear power industry.

For many years, the nuclear power advocates (see Nuclear Nuts) have bleated incessantly that nuclear power is the cheapest form of electric power, citing the infamous South Texas Nuclear Project for production costs of 1.35 cents per kWh. Fine, marvelous, superb, stupendous achievement. One hardly requires an advanced degree in finance, or a Certified Financial Analyst designation, to easily determine that no one in their right mind would build a new 2200 MW nuclear power plant for $17 to $25 billion and sell the power for 1.35 cents per kWh. Yet that is the completely misleading and irresponsible disinformation that nuclear nuts spread in their daily campaign for nuclear power.

On the same basis, therefore, what would be the price of LNG? Could it be zero? Probably not zero, but it would be far cheaper than nuclear power. Even the electric power produced from a natural gas power plant would have nearly zero cost. The way the nuclear nuts obtain their 1.35 cents is merely to ignore the many billions in capital costs to build the plant, and focus instead only on the fuel cost, labor, and maintenance. Natural gas from LNG is almost free on that basis. The gas fields are directly connected to the LNG plant, and the LNG plant provides its own energy by consuming a bit of the natural gas. The re-gasification plant also consumes zero energy, as it too is powered entirely by burning a bit of the re-gasified LNG. Even the LNG ships that transport the LNG across oceans have zero operating cost, as they too are powered by burning re-gasified LNG.

The next time one hears a nuclear nut telling anyone that nuclear power is the cheapest power around, at only 1.5 to 3 cents per kWh, tell them that electric power from natural gas is far cheaper. Tell them that LNG is just about free. Then when they begin to argue, ask them if they want to include capital costs, and compare prices on that basis. Otherwise, nuclear nuts should just shut up.

Their little game has been exposed.

Global Warming and Zero Wind

Unseasonal frost alerts and warnings were, and are, being issued by the National Weather Service in August of 2009. The northern states of Wisconsin, Michigan, upstate New York, Maine, and other New England states all have had such frost warnings in the past few days, as shown above in the bright blue areas in those states.

Is it a coincidence that masses of high pressure air, bearing no wind, settle over these areas? Is it coincidence that the humidity is lower than usual in the high pressure air? The cold temperatures are due, we are told, to heat radiating away from earth through the still, dry air and into the almost perfect blackness of outer space. Yet, we must understand that the CO2 concentration in the air remains the same.

One must suspect, as I certainly do, that winds or the lack thereof, play little to zero role in the vast GCMs, global climate models or general circulation models, so much favored by the AGW crowd who insist that Carbon is Going to Kill Us All -- sometime next week, likely on Tuesday. Yet it is quite apparent that the cold temperatures are due, at least in large part, to dry air masses that remain in a locale with little or no wind. It seems that the U.K. (England etc.) had a few days or weeks this past winter in which a high pressure cell remained fixed over the country, leading to very cold temperatures and no wind. The complaint was that the windmills produced no power during that period, and were useless.

It is also quite apparent that the IPCC's predicted increase in humidity, caused entirely by too much CO2 in the atmosphere that radiates heat downward and into the ocean, is not occurring. The dry air masses that are causing the early frost warnings in the northern U.S. states have, by definition, very low humidity. Yet, the CO2 continues to increase as measured by the station in Hawaii at Mauna Loa. Is there a disconnect here?

This leads to several questions.

1) Is global warming real?

2) Does CO2 actually increase air humidity?

3) Where is the humidity increasing?

4) If the CO2 is already at alarmingly high levels, shouldn't the humidity already be increasing, and these dry air masses that lead to frost warnings be a thing of the past?

5) If, as the IPCC claims, the tropics will have increased humidity, how will they know? Have any IPCC scientists ever been to the tropics? Did they notice that humidity is already very high, and not much increase can occur?

Many of us, myself included, are not trained as climate scientists. Yet, we are trained (as I am) in chemistry, physics, analytical thinking, statistical methods, and quite a few more in my particular case. I must add engineering principles, process control principles, legal principles of causation, production and introduction of evidence, material evidence and hearsay, expert witnesses, forensics, and rhetoric.

Just how long must we, as a country in the U.S., and other countries around the world, be expected to believe the IPCC when the evidence so clearly in front of us belies their deepest held and professed theories? To paraphrase an old but good one, Who are you going to believe, the IPCC or your lying eyes?

Crop-endangering frost in August in the Northern Hemisphere. In a global warming world, per the IPCC. Next they will be telling us all that snow last winter that blanketed Canada from coast to coast (for weeks on end) was really just white powder, likely due to China's power plants pumping out their aerosols. No telling what they will fabricate (or is it prevaricate?) to explain away the vast amounts of snow and cold weather this next winter will bring.

It is an ill wind that blows...nope, not this time. No wind. No humidity. But lots of frost. And CO2 continues to rise.