WolfStock1

22 minutes ago, chubbs said:

No the big difference in my EV chart and yours, is the US vs global. The final numbers aren't in yet, but global EV sales grew by roughly 20% last year, held down by slowing sales in the US. The US is a laggard in both EVs and solar with costs higher than the rest of the world due to tariffs and other factors. Expect the global EV ramp to continue in 2026 spurred by the current oil crisis.

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/international-issues/ev-sales-grew-20-globally-in-2025/

That's fine, except the rest of the world is generally in a different situation than the US.   And the switch to renewables has been painful in many places.   Germany has been the poster child, but their electricity prices have been skyrocketing, and their economy is struggling as a result.    But even with that - most of their energy use is still fossil - well over 70%:

So again - what is the scale of those charts you posted?   It's not there, for a reason.   All they show is "up", but they don't show how *much* up, relative to actual fossil usage.

China has indeed been going full-bore to renewables, but they're still mostly fossil:

They're at about 10% wind and solar.   Again - low-hanging fruit; not baseline power.   And they generally have zero respect for the environment; doing big projects that just aren't feasible in the US.

With regards to EV sales - apples to oranges situation-wise.   They're still heavily subsidized in most places.   If they're a slam-dunk - then why are they so heavily subsidized?

China's EV sales have been doing great - and that's great - but Chinese workers are paid about 1/3 the salary of the US; they can afford to do everything cheaper.  Low hanging fruit, as they try to catch up with the developed work economy-wise.   If they had our level of prosperity they would not be able to do this.   China is also building tons of new coal power plants BTW, along with their renewables growth.    

Look - I'm not trying to argue that renewable energy isn't a good thing, and that it's use is not growing.   I'm just saying that the over/under on benefits vs costs are generally way overblown and propagandized; that the reality is that it's harder than people such as yourself think it is, in particular when it's applied on a universal scale of all energy.

14 hours ago, chubbs said:

Most of the misleading information I see comes from fossil fuel and utility incumbents. For instance, per top link below, the "expense" of additional baseline power to backstop renewables is a fossil fuel fallacy. Renewables are becoming cheaper. Not everywhere and in every application; but, the long term trend is clear. In the future fossil fuels will be less competitive than they are today. Its not only renewables. A number of key energy technologies are on long-term improvement curves: batteries, EV, heat pumps etc. They work together to make energy generation, storage, transmission and use cheaper and more efficient. Meanwhile fossil fuel use is a mature technology; that uses a diminishing resource; and, that carries geopolitical and climate risk that isn't baked into the price. 

https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/renewables-allow-us-to-pay-less-not

https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth

https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/what-is-electrotech-and-what-will

Except that data is old.   And there's no scale.  And it's obviously cumulative, not showing actual new deployments over time.   In short - it's fluff propaganda, not reflecting reality.

E.g. EV sales are now on the decline - e.g. see CA and NY who have detailed trackers on sales, due to their mandate (which will clearly not be met at this point)

As I've maintained - much of renewable energy has been "low hanging fruit" so far, in particular in the U.S.   Specifically - nearly all of our wind-based electricity and our solar-based electricity in the US is generated in places that have... lots of wind and lots of sun.   But - not coincidentally - that tends to be places where there aren't as many people living.  The fraction of renewable generation and use that happens in states that don't get as much sun is much smaller.   The problem is that the highest population concentrations in the US live in those areas - in particular the NE population corridor.

On 3/14/2026 at 6:29 AM, chubbs said:

... renewables are cheaper ....

Making a blanket statement like that shows how how much you've been influenced by the propaganda machine, and generally ill-informed.   In general no - renewables are not cheaper in most circumstances, when all factors are considered (inclusion of additional baseline power sources for when the wind and sun don't cooperate, additional transmission infrastructure, higher land use, etc.).   They can be cheaper only in specific circumstances when the stars align; they are not cheaper in a broad-use infrastructure sense.  

If they were cheaper, then power companies wouldn't need the much-higher-level of subsidies to incentivize their use.

5 minutes ago, csnavywx said:

I mean, you made the point for me here. If we had hedged off w/nuclear (on a scientific, rational basis) we'd be in a much better spot today. But fear won and so did the campaign to offload responsibility onto the individual (e.g. "carbon footprint", "carbon offset" nonsense) and away from capital interests. Label the individual as the "junkie" (Purdue Pharma style, just nicer words) while perpetrating fraud. Sell the fix as cheap and easy and ultimately again, as up to the individual. Ignore the obvious ideological holes. And by god, never ever talk honestly about the tail risk. It was and continues to be a systemic, collective action and thermodynamic problem.

Presuming that you're talking about nuclear - the problem is that there has always been *too much* talk about the tail risk; i.e. blowing out of proportion.

13 minutes ago, csnavywx said:

RE will continue to get more expensive on a PPA basis so long as we continue to ignore the issues plaguing transmission, distribution and direct competition between industrial scale AI/DC buildout and the insane lack of investment in upstream base materials supply (like spinning up mining and refining). I maintain that negative prices on the spot market are a sign of market failure, not something that should be cheered.

These prices certainly are not going to get better this year: 

 

The correct take is that *all energy* will continue to get more expensive in the world we've built for ourselves now. (Disclosure that I am long ICLN -- because yes, most of these companies will try and expand their margins off the backs of the ratepayer and externalizing the grid cost -- my PNL tells me if I'm right or not, so far, so good.)

Interesting.   Got a link for that?   I didn't realize wind and solar prices had been going up like that.   You hear about prices going down, though generally it doesn't include the transmission aspect; which is generally much higher because wind and solar are prevalent in areas where people that use the energy *aren't* as prevalent.   

As such I've maintained that we're about done picking the solar and wind "low hanging fruit"; this chart appears to show evidence of that.

3 hours ago, chubbs said:

Not sure what "physics" you are referring to. Sure fossil fuels easily beat all comers for a long time; but, the day of clear advantage has passed, and fossil fuels continue to slip relative to competition. The combustion of fossil fuels is: inefficient, technically mature, and uses a diminishing natural resource. Meanwhile renewable energy and batteries continue on steady cost improvement curves. 

The current crisis only makes fossil fuels more costly and highlights the geopolitical risk. It isn't easy to replace fossil infrastructure; but, long-term costs are lower without the disruption risk. This will become more apparent as some countries move away from fossil fuels and flourish. Even the US with pro-fossil and anti-renewable policies isn't ramping fossil fuel use, only slowing the transition away. Linked a blog article that discusses India. 

Climate change is only the cherry on the non-fossil cake. 

https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/indias-electrotech-fast-track

 

The physics I was referring to is simply energy density.  Fossil simply has much, much higher energy density than solar, wind, or hydro.   (though a lot less than uranium)

As an example of that - the county that I live in has two interestingly-comparable new power plants:

1.  A natural gas plant that produces 780 MW of power, on 100 acres of land

2.  A solar farm (being built) that will produce 100 MW of power (when the sun peaks), on 800 acres of land

When accounting for base load levels - the solar farm will produce roughly 1/250th the amount as the natural gas plant, on a per-acre basis.

That's what I mean.

(Obviously there's more to it than just acreage-used; that's one example facet)

With regards to India - I don't see any "fast track" in that chart you posted.   It looks like they're behind to me.

They are, however, rapidly catching up in regards to how much CO2 they are emitting, at least compared with the US:

9 hours ago, csnavywx said:

We win when we hedge the risk properly. The phenomenon you're describing is literally us discarding that tendency to hedge out the window, right as volatility ramps. Yeah, policy prescription has sucked to this point and the shilling about the "low cost of transition" has turned out to be damaging and wrong (if you have doubts, look at PPA prices and virtually every base metal in the past couple of years) It was always going to be costly (a significant % of GDP). The balking at the cost is understandable and the damage costs *to this point* have been mostly a "freebie" since it's a) mostly indirect, b) have not pushed us outside historical ranges except at/very near the equator, c) non-linear change tends to be slow at first, and d) tech/econ growth rate has been enough to offset. Problem is, if you wait until forward economic growth is meaningfully impacted, much slowing towards zero, then you are already too late.

Hedging 20 years ago would've been much cheaper.

Hedging now is fairly expensive.

Hedging 20 years from now will be extraordinarily expensive.

You hedge when it's cheap, not when you have to. But until we do hedge this risk properly and start really taking it seriously, the doomers will be right. You are literally short selling a temp graph that is accelerating up.

It was *never* going to be anywhere close to "cheap" to hedge, at any point.   You're fighting not only physics, but politics and human nature.   It would require not only taking a huge hit to our prosperity - but convincing all the other countries in the world to take that same hit.  Good luck with that.  I don't think you understand just *how* much of our prosperity is based on the foundation of fossil fuel use.   It's literally been the basis for the industrial revolution.   The big inflection point was 150 years ago - not 20 years ago.   But if we somehow had managed to avoid that inflection point - we wouldn't have anything close to the prosperity we do today.

We perhaps had a smidgen of a chance decades ago, with the advent of nuclear power.   But then the clueless anti-nuke lobby, led by the likes of Ralph Nader, ensured that wasn't going to happen*.    Even still that would have only gotten us so far; even with all-nuclear electricity we still would have other fossil fuel uses in transportation and industry to deal with.

(*Edit: In his defense - he didn't know about MMGW back then.   He might have a difference stance today if so.   Nevertheless - he and others like him were responsible for the extreme over-reactive risk aversion that killed nuclear.)

SW of Leesburg:

Big drop yesterday was storm line.   Now down to 32.7 and snowing hard.

On 3/8/2026 at 6:04 PM, Typhoon Tip said:

+That bold statement of yours is the very reason the world should be very afraid.   

It still does not resonate enough with people that enormity of raising an entire planetary system, air, sea and air-sea coupled, unilaterally, by a whole degree C, over span of time that is virtually instant in geological scales - but frankly, disturbingly fast even for the single life span of a human being. 

If that can happen without warning and those zero extrapolated expectation, ... good luck

Sorry but the FUD approach is just getting tiresome.   I think you vastly underestimate both the adaptability of humans and the durability of planet Earth.

People hear what Chicken Littles have been saying for decades - and then they look at the *actual* impacts that are happening - and the two just don't match.   E.g. Weather-related deaths continue to decline, mass die-offs of species like polar bears isn't happening, coastal areas aren't becoming inhabitable due to being underwater, the polar regions still have year-round ice, etc.

As a result the general population seems to be souring on the climate change hysteria, realizing that we aren't in fact in an existential crisis, with many even questioning the veracity of the predictions wholesale.   Maybe it would behoove to be more pragmatic in the approach - something other than "the world should be very afraid" stance.

IMO trying to use/apply a single decade's worth of data is a fool's errand.   There's too much background noise there in the ENSO and solar cycles.   IMO anything meaningful with regards to changes in the rate of increase would need to be over at least a 20-year period, or even 30.

That said "meaningful" here I equate with "strong evidence".   10-year data isn't totally meaningless - it's worth at least eyebrow-furrowing when it indicates something unusual.  I just wouldn't use it to make a statement to the effect of "this shows that the rate of warming is increasing".

I believe UHI effect, while a thing, is overblown as well.   My point though is - deniers like to point to UHI as tainting the data and general claims of trends, so in order to remove all doubt it would be good to have a data set (more than a single station, but rather hundreds of stations) that are truly remote.   It appears the USCRN is a mix of some remote and some not-so-remote sites.    Doing a filter of the USCRN data and weeding out the not-so-remote sites and presenting an average would seem like the thing to do.

The Lake Erie thing actually brings something else to mind.  Has anyone done studies on how much water warming (mainly rivers and lakes) is due to general industrialization vs greenhouse effect?    It seems like it could be quite significant actually.    I mention this because I was looking into water usage recently (context was discussion on data centers) and found that actually one of the biggest water consumers in the US is power plants - used for cooling.   There's more water used for cooling power plants than there is for irrigation, believe it or not.  Much of this is evaporative but much ends up back in rivers and lakes, raising their temperature.   Much is used for other industrial things as well, which certainly raises the temperature some.   

11 minutes ago, GaWx said:

 

1) Cumberland is certainly rural: https://www.nps.gov/cuis/planyourvisit/staffordbeach.htm

2)-3) Ichauway appears quite rural, too:

https://www.jonesctr.org/about-us/

4) Colham Ferry appears to be a burb of Watkinsville, a town with only ~3K:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watkinsville,_Georgia#:~:text=Watkinsville is the largest city,County%2C Georgia Metropolitan Statistical Area.

 ————

 What do you think of these 4 as far as not having UHI to worry about?

Yes unlike many of the others Georgia appears to have done a good job picking truly remote sites.  Ideally you'd like to see all the sites be like that, since it's usually an average of all sites that's shown (e.g. in the X post).

I haven't looked for it, but was just noticing that a lot of the references in this thread to records / high trends are in areas that may be subject to UHI effect.   Would be nice to see some for remote sites instead, since IMO that's much more meaningful.

2 hours ago, GaWx said:

Blairsville, GA

Here are the Georgia sites:

59 minutes ago, TheClimateChanger said:

We've had that for 21, going on 22, years - it's called the United States Climate Reference Network and it shows more, not less, warming than the official numbers over the period of overlap. 

 

Hmmm - well - looking at their locations https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/  - that's not really what I'm talking about.   It looks like just about all of those sites are actually suburban sites, or at least "close to city" rural sites.     For example the one in central NC is in Duke Forest - but that's practically surrounded by Durham, which is a fast-growing urban area.   The one in southern LA is at Cade Farm which is rural-ish, but is only 3 miles from the edge of Lafayette.   The one in western VA is only 1 mile from I-64 and Charlottesville, Etc.

What I'm talking about would be truly rural sites - ones where there isn't a significant city within about 50-100 miles or so.    I see very few if any sites of those that fit that bill.

Not an expert in UHI effects, but Lander isn't exactly the middle of nowhere - it is a town of 7k+ people.

What's needed is data like this from actual remote sites, that aren't at cities / towns at all - e.g. sensors at national parks / forests, etc.    Remove all question w/regards to UHI.

About damn time.  

SW of Leesburg VA we got right at 5", so it appears more than most in the area.

Was a really sticky and beautiful snow Sunday night.

(we got a bit more after the pic was taken)

4 minutes ago, chubbs said:

Yes, climate change an amplifying factor. Makes weather or problems in society worse. Likewise its emblematic of our ability to address complex problems.  If we can't address climate change we won't solve other problems either.

 

Bunk.

The world has solved lots of problems, without having solved all of them.   The notion that if you can't solve one problem then you can't solve any problem is ludicrous.

21 minutes ago, bluewave said:

You don’t really have even the most basic understanding of how complex worldwide systems work. We currently have a two-tiered economic system around the world.

Your level of understanding of worldwide systems, and your worldview, is made pretty clear from that last sentence.   The rest just naturally follows, and isn't even worth addressing.   We'll just leave it at that.   

18 minutes ago, bluewave said:

Several of the biggest human migration stories since 2010 have a MMGW component as a contributing factor. A major trigger for the refugee crisis and migration into Europe was a crop failure caused by MMGW in the Middle East earlier in the last decade. Same for the wave of migration north from Central America into the U.S. following MMGW crop failures over the last decade. When those stressors combined with the background issues of extreme poverty they tipped the balance to mass migrations to escape those conditions.

Within the U.S. some parts of the country with extreme hurricane activity over the last decade due to record SSTs leading to the record rapid intensification of hurricanes have seen a steep increase in homeowners insurance. So many have gotten priced out of those markets.

Same across the Western U.S. where drought and wildfire activity have made some spots uninsurable leading to people exiting these regions. The good news is that we have sophisticated weather warning systems here to help save lives. But less developed parts of the world with increasing extremes haven’t been as lucky since they lack the warning systems we have.

Parts of the Southeast U.S. have experienced rapid sea level rise since the 1990s combined with subsidence and groundwater pumping  leading to saltwater intrusion. So several new high rises have been sinking and older structures have been having issues salt water intrusion into their foundations.

We hope that the fragile WAIS will take hundreds of years to slowly  melt. But they recently discovered that in past ice ages there were rapid melt episodes where significant  sea level rise occurred in just a few decades. Sea level rise following past ice ages wasn’t  that big of a deal since the world wasn’t covered by coastal megacities like we have today.

So an unexpected rapid sea level rise in any future decades due to our incomplete understanding of ice sheet dynamics would trigger a wave of migrations which would make the migrations since 2010 look tiny in comparison. 

Plus nearly all of the time when we pass critical climate thresholds we don’t know we have crossed into a new regime until it has already occurred. While the earth is a very resilient system, we really don’t understand how making these rapid alterations to the climate system will fully play out. Ecosystems are delicately balanced and what seems like a small change scan have a a much bigger impact than we understand. 

This whole climate experiment we have been running reminds me a bit of the great song by Pink Floyd.

 

Boy you hit about all the MMGW scapegoat talking points there, didn't you?   You forgot about rape though.  (Yes, it's a thing)

I'll just hit one of the scaries for now - crop failures - the rest can be inferred.

The sky-is-falling narrative tends to fall apart when you look at the actual data, and not individual anecdotes.

(ironically - much like looking at a weather event and claiming that it's an indicator of climate trends)

2 hours ago, bluewave said:

I think it’s more a function of human nature and our evolution that the warming planet doesn’t really get as much attention as other issues do. We evolved during ice ages that were tremendously challenging to just survive without the modern amenities we have today. So historically cold has been more of a concern than it being too warm. 

Most of the migration within the United States is from colder locations to the warmer sunbelt locations from Arizona to Texas and Florida. So it’s natural when we have a very cold 16 day period for most of the attention to be focused on cold since we have normalized all the record warmth in recent years.  

The cold stands out much more even though the magnitude, duration, and geographic footprint has been getting smaller over time. I also believe on a greater level most people outside this forum don’t like the cold and snow during winter. 

But this misses the long term challenges of the destabilizing effects of more extreme weather leading to migration shifts from areas which become difficult to survive in. 

Well there's also the fact that it's lot harder to survive in extreme cold than it is in extreme heat, which is why so many more people die each year from cold weather.

Human comfort / survivability is not one of the negative effects of MMGW.    Sea level rise and increase in storms, yes.   But not the temperature itself.

IMO areas becoming "difficult to survive in" is a non-issue for MMGW.   Any slight increase in storm activity is just noise in the overall background of improved infrastructure and weather prediction.  A *lot* fewer people die these days from hurricanes and floods than they did in years past.

(Sea level rise of course is a non-issue w/regards to survivability; the creep is way slower than natural human birth/death cycles.   I always have to laugh when I hear of literal human "danger" proposed as being due to sea level rise.)

7 hours ago, chubbs said:

The earth's output is not constant. Instead It is modulated by ENSO. More radiation out during El Nino when the atmosphere is relatively warm and less during La Nina when the atmosphere is cool.

 

Are you sure?    Why is it that the Wikipedia page on the subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgoing_longwave_radiation

doesn't discuss ENSO?

The chart that's there doesn't seem to follow ENSO cycles:

Keep in mind we're not talking about radiation *into* the atmosphere here (what I think is most affected by ENSO), we're talking about radiation from all earth elements (including the atmosphere) out into space (outgoing longwave radiation).

Though I haven't attempted any kind of mathematical correlation - I thought ENSO cycles were generally much longer duration than what's in that chart.

On 2/10/2026 at 3:30 PM, Typhoon Tip said:

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-january-hottest-cold-snap-eu.html

So here's a question.

Given that "the planet" is generally a self-contained system with very little (essentially no) variance in externalities with regards to energy inputs (mainly solar irradiance - generally near-constant) and output (terrestrial radiation - generally near-constant) - shouldn't the warming of the planet just be essentially a straight (or curved) line with an always-upwards slope, such that a new record should be set *every* year?

Or is it the case that it's really just these records are just really just referring to "the places we are measuring" and not "the planet" as a whole?

Yes - question is somewhat rhetorical, but is intended to trigger some thought.   If one presumes that the planet as a whole is warming continually, then what are the "holes" in the data?   Are there significant areas of the ocean for instance that we're just not measuring, and the reason we don't see a new record every year is because of the non-existent data that would offset the data we do have?   Or perhaps is it the case that we are in fact measuring the whole "surface" (including the oceans), but the surface temperature as a whole actually does go up and down based on something - e.g. subterranean effects e.g. "bubbles" in mantle convection, or perhaps solar cycles?

Never seen in person but would very much *love* to see - sprites: