Introduction
When we flip the switch, the lights come on without anyone thinking about it. This has only been true for the last hundred years in metropolitan areas, and for only approximately eighty years in rural areas with the enactment of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.
In 1935, only 25 percent of rural homes in the United States had electricity, and there are people alive today who grew up without electricity. Today, few people are even aware of the monolithic system that generates, distributes, and controls the electricity that flows with seeming effortlessness across the United States. This system is referred to as the grid, which is actually three grids covering the entire lower forty-eight states.
Over the past one hundred years, there have been only two area-wide blackouts affecting over 30 million people caused by a failure of the transmission system. There have been other blackouts—mostly caused by storms—affecting smaller groups, perhaps as many as several million people. Overall, the grid has worked remarkably well. Reliability can still be improved upon, but this is primarily a question of placing transmission and distribution lines underground to minimize weather-induced outages.
Suddenly, we are faced with a threat to the grid we haven’t seen before. It is a threat that can dramatically increase blackouts and the suffering that accompanies them. Some in leadership positions have viewed climate change as an existential threat to mankind and have implemented actions to eliminate fossil fuels from the generation of electricity. Some have claimed that wind and solar and other renew- ables can replace all the coal-fired, natural gas, and nuclear power plants in the United States. It can be argued that the actions these people are taking are making electricity more costly and less reliable, and placing Americans at risk for little or no reason. They are willing to gamble the safety and lives of Americans, as well as the American economy, on an ideology.
Our nation has suffered through a medical war fighting COVID-19 in which thousands died. As my neighbor said,
“The inability of our country to anticipate the corona- virus pandemic and put in place adequate reserves of all of the things we needed—PPE, ventilators, masks, tests, hospital beds, etc.—speaks loudly and directly to the need for reliable on-demand electricity and the need to plan for it right now.”
Imagine if Americans had to suffer through rolling blackouts while quarantined at home during a future pandemic. How would newly erected emergency hospitals operate without electricity, let alone our existing hospitals without diesel fuel or natural gas to power emergency generators?
This was brought home by an oped in the Washington Post. Quoting from the op-ed:
Residential use is up as workers and school children stay home.
[Demand is down] in locked up restaurants, offices and factories.
Hospitals are a different story: They consume twice as much per square foot as hotels . . . lead schools and office buildings by an even greater margin. And their work couldn’t be more vital as they confront the novel coronavirus.
A grid operator, sequestered in his dispatch center in East Greenbush, New York, said it all, “Keeping the lights on. . . . It’s so critical.”3
There is little doubt there will be another pandemic. The only question is when. We must do what is needed to guarantee adequate and reliable supplies of electricity in preparation for the next pandemic.
President Trump recognized the vital importance of the grid when he issued an executive order on May 1, 2020, to protect the grid from foreign adversaries. He said the grid, “provides the electricity that sup- ports our national defense, vital emergency services, critical infrastruc- ture, economy, and way of life.”
There is also an ideology that threatens the grid. This book will examine how federal regulators, state governments, utility companies, and the operators of the grid themselves are imposing their beliefs about climate change on all Americans and placing the grid in great jeopardy. Unelected bureaucrats and self-imposed intelligentsia are making decisions that place all Americans in danger.
Looming Energy Crisis will show you why we must continue to use fossil fuels and why we must protect the grid from the actions of those who are imposing their personal beliefs on the rest of us. Our objective should be low-cost reliable electricity available for everyone.
Reliability is a national security issue.
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Agree — Tony is very proficient at exposing data fraud used by climate alarmists.
Thanks for your comments. I know you have introduced Heller to many people with your videos. The idea that CO2 emissions are an existential threat to mankind is a fraud being used to help destroy our country.
Donn, just a personal note that I hope you are able to write your posts for many years to come! (And yes, I know that you are even older than I am.)
Best regards, always,
Meredith
Thanks. I’ll keep doing what ever I can for as long as I can, but will probably have to cut back and write less frequently.
It’s even more important that you keep up with your writing and talks.
We need to keep the free flow of factual information to as many people as possible.
The media has failed our country, so individuals, such as you, have to keep truth alive.
Thank you, Donn. I will try.
I deeply appreciate your encouragement.
Donn,
Unfortunately, many of our fellow citizens and especially the youth that recently approached voting age seem to have misguidance from Public School Indoctrination, Social Media, the Entertainment Industry, Celebrities and the MSM. It is as if they are on a Religious Crusade to save the Planet and to Hell with all that is really important. Changing their beliefs will be very difficult, as difficult as converting a person to a different Religion. But, we all need to keep trying to do our best to help spread the truth on energy and the importance of reasonable cost & reliable energy to keeping America strong and to preserve our Freedoms and quality of life. Keep up the great work my friend, Dick Storm
Thanks. I appreciate your encouragement.
I agonize over the fraud and its implications. Added to this is your statement that you may soon have to stop your blog.
Thanks. I’ll keep writing articles, as long as I can. I may, however, stop doing so many.
Tony Heller typically gives a valuable service in exposing the radical and excessive-HYPE often seen in the news about recent climate. And he does that here. But, I have some serious criticism of his comments about the greenhouse warming mechanism.
Heller assumes that the satellite data he shows are a good monitor of Earth’s surface & near-surface temperature. Although some satellites do measure actual surface temperature (indirectly), e.g., MODIS & Terra, the graph Heller shows represents troposphere temperature only (e.g., Univ. Alabama, Huntsville). The atmosphere only contains a very small percentage of Earth’s “surface” heat. In principle, the average temperature of the surface can differ from atmosphere alone because of e.g., energy exchange rates between surface and atmosphere, or overall albedo of atmosphere. It is conceivable that recently atmospheric warming does not mirror global warming.
Heller suggests that H2O and CO2 overlap considerably in their IR absorption frequencies. There is some overlap around the major 15 micron CO2 BAND. However, because H2O condenses it typically releases its final IR flux in the mid-troposphere. CO2 does not condense and releases its IR to space in the higher, colder atmosphere. Much of those H2O released photons are absorbed at greater altitudes by CO2 and emitted again at colder temperatures. Because the IR flux into space is proportional to temperature of IR emission, the IR finally released into space is controlled by CO2 and not H2O. The colder, lower flux IR release from CO2 means that CO2 controls the amount of warming in those frequencies. And lower IR emission to space means greater warming.
Old lab experiments are not relevant here, because their restricted geometry is not equivalent to what occurs in the atmosphere.
Water does dominate that downwelling IR that warms the surface, and this is because water molecules are much more abundant than CO2 molecules in the lower atmosphere. Much of the energy deposited in the atmosphere through IR absorption by greenhouse gases and transfer of much of that energy by kinetic processes to other molecules is then transferred to the surface via downward IR from water. But this is part of an energy loop distributing that excess energy produced by greenhouse warming among various components of Earth’s near surface. It does not account for the original greenhouse warming that caused this IR energy downwelling to occur. The original greenhouse warming occurred in the higher atmosphere and depends on the efficiency by which Earth expels to space (via IR) that energy it received from the Sun. The Ratio of energy-in to energy-out is the major determinant of global temperature.
There is a significant difference between the two questions: Does CO2 cause some warming; and Is CO2 the sole cause of warming and is it producing catastrophic warming? The answers are Yes and No.
I agree with Heller that some climate scientists are either ignorant of the field they are representing or acting fraudulently. As for news reporters, they wish to report the most sensational story in order to attract the greatest attention, regardless of its accuracy.
With respect to reporters. Their motives are far more sinister than indicated. They have bought into the left’s program to change America from a free capitalist, market oriented society, to a Marxist, Communist government controlled society, under the false assumption that Democratic Socialism is different from Chinese, Cuban, Venezuelan, or Soviet styled communism.
We need to recognize what is happening, and combat the misinformation perpetuated by the media and their reporters.
This is at the heart of my articles, and Tony Heller’s as well.
You have a far better grasp of the science than the average person, so your comments always add to the posts.
I think you meant that CO2 is a cause of warming, without inferring it is the sole cause of warming. No question, it’s not causing catastrophic warming.
Don B.
There are no numbers in your comment.
Science without numbers is just a generic theory.
We need to know the percentage of warming since 1975 that was caused by CO2, if any.
We need to know why there is no evidence before 1975 that CO2 has even been the “control knob” of the global average temperature.
We need to know how rising CO2 from 1940 to 1975 could be accompanied by global cooling (as reported in 1975 — that cooling has since been “adjusted away”), while from 1975 to 2021, rising CO2 was accompanied by global warming.
We need to know the where and when of warming, not a single global average temperature, that not one person lives in.
We need to know why the pleasant warming in the past 325 years should be considered a problem.
We need to know why 64 years of predicting a coming climate crisis have been wrong.
The coming climate crisis, of course, is nothing more than a prediction — a prediction that began with oceanographer Roger Revelle in 1957.
And climate predictions have been notoriously inaccurate in the past 64 years.
All of these unanswered questions add up to one conclusion: Climate science if far from settled.
The actions proposed to “fight” climate change are the true climate emergency !
The UAH satellite compilations of the global average temperature are valuable for several reasons:
– They measure in the troposphere where the greenhouse effect occurs
– Satellites have near global coverage, unlike the surface numbers, with lots of guesses (aka “infilling”) which can never be verified.
– The troposphere is never affected by economic growth, population growth or land use changes.
— The scientists who compile UAH data do not believe in a coming climate crisis, and have not predicted a coming climate crisis — so they do not need to report lots of warming to justify their own climate predictions.
Even with all those advantages, there is no way to be sure UAH numbers are as accurate as claimed.
They do have the potential to be more accurate than surface measurements. Because surface measurements have a large amount of infilling, and have been subjected to repeated “adjustments” over many decades, such as gradually “disappearing” the global cooling from 1940 to 1975.
The UAH temperature statistic is a check and balance for surface measurements made by government bureaucrats who can not be trusted.
Every scientist seems to have his or her own conclusion about CO2.
Almost all conclusions will be wrong if we ever get to the truth.
Which leads to one logical conclusion: No one knows exactly what CO2 does in the atmosphere.
There are too many variables that can cause climate change to pinpoint exaxtly what CO2 does.
So the right answer is: We do not know.
We do have evidence that whatever CO2 does, a rise of a few ppm per year has not caused any harm at all.
When you consider the locations and timing of the most warming since 1975 (warmer Arctic nights, mainly in the colder months of the year), and the greening of our planet, the climate change since 1975 has been good news.
Why would anyone with sense want to stop good news?
Note: This comment was originally published on my climate science and energy blog, with over 212,000 page views, at
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
Thanks. Great comments and thanks for link to your site.
Donn
I am sorry to hear you may be writing less in the future.
Of the 15 climate science and energy blogs and websites I view every day, this one is in the top 5. Concise articles on important subjects.
Concerning Tony Heller.
He does the best job in the world of exposing failed climate predictions, but has two faults that I hope are not going to spread here:
(1) Completely unlike Donn Dears, Mr. Heller has a nasty temper when someone does not agree with him. Years ago, based on my research, I commented on Heller’s blog that the US acres burned from wildfires chart he used exaggerated the acres burned in the 1930s by including CCC prescribed burns in southeastern US states. None of the other US fire zones had such a trend. As a result of my correct comment, Mr. Heller banned me from further comments on his blog. That’s quite a temper, and
(2) Mr. Heller has very conservative views on economics, COVID and other non-climate related subjects. I generally agree with those views, so they don’t bother me, BUT those other subjects can turn off readers who are only interested in learning climate science.
Thanks. I greatly appreciate your thoughts about my articles. I hope to continue as long as possible, but will cut back somewhat.
I have never commented on Heller’s videos, and am sorry to hear he doesn’t accept negative comments graciously.
For the most part, I have found him to be accurate and effective in presenting his arguments, which is why I recommended him to others.
The Heller videos are very good. I was ONLY referring to some of his replies to comments left on his blog, that are very much unlike your polite responses to all comments.
And Heller’s non-climate articles might turn off some viewers.
Heller’s website is a treasure chest of historical climate information. He is an expert on detecting modern climate science BS … which is a full time job.
And like you, he realizes how much of “climate change” is a fake crisis to support left-wing politics, with little real science back-up
“Climate change” is always wrong predictions of a coming climate crisis … that never shows up — it must have gotten lost somewhere on the way !
Thanks. He is on the right side of history, which is important.