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Germany and solar cells A friend I have regular discussions with wrote this in an email in 2006:
Even the Americans are slowly blinking in the dawn of realisation. It’s not even worth trying – on one side you have massive amounts of peer-reviewed solid evidence. On the other side, you have Rob regurgitating conspiracy blogs. What can you do?
Just the other day, on Google Plus, the same friend linked to a paper called Germany’s Solar Cell Promotion: An Unfolding Disaster, containing section headings like “The Immense Financial Consequences of PV Promotion”.
Something has changed.
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Eh?! Nothing’s changed at all! That sented was from an email exchange about whether climate change was really happening or not. (Hint: Records have been broken for the coldest/wettest/dryest/hottest pretty much everywhere, year on year).
Not entirely sure how that relates to the poor business case of massively subsidising the wrong technology at the wrong time. It’s like saying:
“I once saw Jon buy a pint of Worthington one evening – a week later one morning I saw him buying a pint of semi-skimmed and a bag of ground coffee – something’s changed”.
I can think something’s a bad idea AND point out that massive 30’s style droughts are happening across America can’t I? They’re not mutually exclusive 🙂
Hmm. Comparing current climate with that of eighty years ago does not really demonstrate change!
PS I know the climate is changing, there used to be a thousand foot thick layer of ice above where I am now sat.
—“I can think something’s a bad idea AND point out that massive 30’s style droughts are happening across America can’t I?”—
Massive 30’s style droughts. I’ll give you that the amount of rain fall is below average, but “massive 30’s style droughts”? That’s ridiculous. So no, you can’t think that.
DigitalToast is correct to point out that whether any given hypothesis about climate is true or not is a separate question from whether stupid things should be done in response to it.
The change I had in mind was that he had gone from fully believing the BBC climate change narrative (whatever it is) to mistrusting it. Perhaps I was wrong.
Given the 365 days in a year, 52 weeks, 12 months & 4 seasons, if a record wasn’t broken for hottest, coldest, driest, wettest, windiest, calmest something it’d probably be….a……record.
The “amusing” part is that I see, to this day, people pushing Germany as a model of how awesome we could be at Alternative Energy if only we’d throw a vast fortune at it.
I’ve mostly given up even bothering to point out the cost/benefit analysis to people doing so, on the grounds that if they were interested in that they wouldn’t be pushing Massive Subsidies* in the first place.
(* This is even more “amusingly” often combined with railing against the more-or-less-mythical giant “subsidies” provided to oil production.
Even if the latter weren’t a pipe dream, at least petrochemicals provide cheap energy, and in a way useful for base load generation, which things solar can’t come close to doing.)
I hope the German’s solar cells are in a sunny place, like Greece.
Jon, there was massive climate change 20,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. When I did my year long meteorology forecaster’s course in 1971, climate change was dealt with in the first day. It was well known then that climate at any location was likely to change over periods of 30 to 40 years so we were told to be careful using records longer than that as they were not likely to be a true record of current climate (the Boulder dam/Colorado River was perfect example of this). It was also well known that there were periods of years at a time when the wind flows in the atmosphere were zonal and others where they were meridional. Zonal means West – east, meridional means north – south. In zonal flow years the weather was unlikely to be surprising, in meridional years you get hot and cold extremes. Nobody knows why this is so.
If you are worried about climate change, you don’t know enough about the subject.
“I can think something’s a bad idea AND point out that massive 30’s style droughts are happening across America can’t I?”
So already happened in 1930’s?
And maybe in 1830’s
and in 1730’s
etc…
There was a severe drought across the north of England during the last seven years of Elisabeth’s the First rule
Must have been Bush’s fault, Regional.
The reason that they are now admitting that solar cells are not very good (in fact a money pit) may be that new designs of solar cells are on the way….
“Our old ones were crap – but our new ones…..”
The same is true of wind power – they will finally admit it is a farcen(and it is a farce – it is SUBSIDY farming not “wind farming”) when (and if) they come up with some new wind technology they wish to sell.
As for man made globel warming…..
The arch supporter of this (a true believer) is the fouder of the British environmental movement – Gaia Man (James Lovelock).
James Lovelock, as I say above, readlly does believe in man made globel warming – therefore he is an ardent supporter of NUCLEAR POWER.
If the “Green” dominated establishment (in Germany and so on) really believed in man made globel warming they would be ardent supporters of nuclear power also.
In fact they are trying to CLOSE DOWN nuclear power stations – indeed the German government has agreed to CLOSE DOWN all nuclear power stations.
So the international establishment clearly do NOT believe in man made global warming – if they did they would be supporting a crash program of building nuclear power stations around the world ( the OPPOSITE of what they are doing).
So whatever the establishment are motivated by it is clearly NOT a sincere belief in man made global warming.
And if the establishment do not really believe in it (if judged by their actions – not their words) then why should anyone else?
massive 30’s style droughts are happening
It’s an unprecedented recurrence.