by C. Monckton of Brenchley, Apr 21 , 2021, in WUWT
James Hansen is often debited with having stirred up so much alarm with his notorious 1988 prediction of runaway global warming in front of the U.S. Senate that IPeCaC was hastily founded later that year, so as to Save The Planet.
His prediction ran to 2020. How, then, did fantasy-land compare with more than two decades of sober, observed reality? The graph, zeroed so that the 1988 HadCRUT4 observed anomaly lies between Hansen’s three scenarios, shows that observed warming was closest to Hansen’s Scenario C.
However, the assumption underlying Scenario C is that everyone would be so scared following Hansen’s Senate testimony that what is now called “net-zero” would be achieved by 2000. Well, it wasn’t. And it won’t be, even by 2050. The chief reason is discernible in the Texas electricity grid collapse.
The Lone Star State, which ought to have had more common sense, decided that once it had carpeted the state with windmills (14th-century technology to fail to solve a 21st-century non-problem) and solar panels (produced by slave labor in China) it could reduce its dispatchable thermal grid capacity.
However, as any grid manager will tell you, you can’t do that. Not the least of the reasons why unreliables are so cripplingly expensive is that it is necessary to maintain the entire pre-existing grid regardless of how many unreliables are bolted on to it. Unreliables, therefore, inflict not only a deadweight cost but also a deadweight surplus capacity to the grid, to say nothing of the costly instability caused by giving unreliables precedence over thermal in meeting demand.
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