Power outages in Venezuela Prove Fossil Fuels Are Not More Reliable Than Renewables – Increase By That?

Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to the BBC, stratospheric cooling proves human-caused global warming, but we should expect some global cooling during the upcoming solar minima.

COP26: The truth behind the new climate change denial

By Rachel Schraer & Kayleen Devlin
BBC Reality Check

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Statement: The sun will cool, stop global warming

Humans have long erroneously asserted that temperature changes over the past century are just part of the Earth’s natural cycle, and not the result of human behavior.

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Solar minima is a real phenomenon where the Sun radiates less energy as part of its natural cycle.

Studies suggest that the Sun will probably go through a weaker phase at some point in this century, but this will lead to, at best temporary cooling 0.1 – 0.2C of the planet.

That’s not nearly enough to offset human activity, which has warmed the planet by about 1.2C over the past 200 years and will continue to rise, possibly peaking at 2.4C later this century.

We know the recent increase in temperature is not caused by changes in the Sun’s natural cycle because The near-earth atmosphere is warming, while the layer of atmosphere closest to the Sun – stratosphere – cooling.

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Statement: Global warming is good

Many online posts claim that global warming will make parts of the earth more habitable and that the cold kills more people than the heat.

These arguments often single out facts in favor while ignoring any facts that contradict them.

Eg, it is true that some endearing cold regions of the world may become more livable for a while.

But in the same places, warming could also lead to extreme rainfall, affecting living conditions and the ability to grow crops,

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Statement: Climate change action will make people poorer

A joint statement by opponents of efforts to tackle climate change is that fossil fuels are essential to driving economic growth.

So limiting their use, the argument goes, will inevitably stunt this growth and raise the cost of living, hurting the poorest.

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In many places, renewable electricity – powered by wind or solar for example – now cheaper than electricity powered by coal, oil or gas.

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Statement: Renewable energy is dangerously unreliable

Misleading posts claiming that renewable energy failures led to outages went viral earlier this year, when a major grid failure left millions of Texans in darkness and cold.

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“Outages are a cause of inefficient power generation and distribution management,” said John Gluyas, executive director of the Durham Energy Institute.

He said claims that renewables cause power outages are “nonsense…. Venezuela has a lot of oil and often loses power“.

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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-enosystem-59251912

Cooling the stratosphere not as simple as the BBC portrays. A few weeks ago a student in Alaska who doesn’t quite understand cross-polar jets, an atmospheric phenomenon in tropical equator, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, so the claim that the science of the stratosphere has been settled is unequivocal.

And there is another, much more powerful Greenhouse Gas that can affect conditions in the stratosphere.

Stratospheric water vapor changes may contribute to the observed stratospheric cooling

Piers M. de F. Forster, Keith P. Shine

In previous studies, the stratospheric cooling observed over the past two decades was largely due to a combination of stratospheric ozone loss and an increase in carbon dioxide, and as such it is used to provide one of the best evidence for a human-caused climate change. This study shows how an increase in stratospheric water vapor, inferred from existing observations, can cause as much cooling as ozone loss; Since the reasons for the rise in stratospheric water vapor are not fully understood and are not well characterized, it remains uncertain whether stratospheric cooling could be entirely due to human influence or not. Alternatively, changes in water vapor in the stratosphere may have contributed, since 1980, to a radiative force that increased that 40% by carbon dioxide alone.

Read more: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/1999GL010487

There is a strong case that Global warming is good for humans – more people die in winter than in summer, especially in cold countries. Winter is dangerous for tropical apes, even if we have warm clothes and a house to live in. We’re going to need a lot of global warming to correct that imbalance. The tropics are so used to dealing with heavy rainfall that even our smallest urban sewers are about a foot wide. A little bit of civil engineering can deal with any reasonable variation in rainfall.

As for the BBC’s silliest claim, comparison of Venezuela, which claims that renewable energy can be solved by better power management, that can actually be done – if by power management you mean shutting down all consumers mains electricity, such as home heating, when renewables fail. All that Venezuela’s experience demonstrates is that governments have an unlimited capacity to shoulder their basic responsibilities, like keeping the lights on.

Renewable instability and the need for contingency show the BBC that climate action will not make people poorer as a complete fiction.

Britain came very close to an involuntary shutdown a month ago, when wind and solar were idle for a week, and energy-hungry continental Europe consumed most of Russia’s available gas. Even now, thanks to cooler than expected temperatures, demand is straining supply. Power shortages caused by renewables caused a spike in electricity prices and, in September, caused a chain of retail energy retailers to collapse. Renewable energy may be cheap, when it works, but a regular supply of renewable energy is really expensive.

Worse still, the people running the backup system also claim subsidies or other forms of compensation. It is not financially acceptable to leave an expensive multi-billion dollar plant idle even for some time, when the success of energy investments is measured against rate of return on investment. Fossil fuel plant operators claim to be compensated at a rate equivalent to the profits they would make if they provided electricity all the time, otherwise they would cut their losses, shutting down the plants. backup power, take advantage of what valuable components they can use elsewhere, and leave. So no matter how cheap renewable energy is, the cost of keeping both the renewable system and the fossil fuel backup system on hot standby is what makes electricity in heavy countries renewables are too expensive.

There was a time when the BBC would never publish such half-hearted nonsense, they will go into detail about their own statements, and point out the issues I just listed, in the interest of maintaining the BBC’s high standards of journalistic integrity. I grew up watching BBC documentaries, which endeavor to present all sides of the issues under discussion and provide evidence to support their editorial views. My teachers sometimes show us BBC works in class, as an example of how to analyze problems and argue both sides of an issue. But in my opinion, the days of objective devotion are long gone.