Winds of change

The cruel reality of so-called "green" energy may be catching up with the McGuinty Liberals.

After years of touting wind projects as a critical piece of the alternative energy puzzle, the government let slip — very quietly — that offshore wind projects are no longer part of the game plan.

But it's not just offshore wind projects that are proving to be impractical. A legal challenge to the Green Energy Act is being heard by the Ontario Divisional Court:

If the challenge is successful, it will significantly impede wind development in Ontario until the province can provide satisfactory evidence that there is no evidence of negative health impacts associated with wind farms, an issue that has been the subject of much debate.

It gets even worse. Kelly McParland on the solar energy front:

On Friday, hundreds more Ontarians were told that installations they’d erected at the behest of the government can’t be connected to the provincial grid because of technical problems. Rural residents, some of whom have invested large amounts in solar generating operations, will be left high and dry.

Instead of trying to please his latte sipping yuppies in the GTA with his "green" policies, McGuinty should have given some thought to thousands of rural residents who will be forced to live in close proximity to his wind machines. They're angry. And those people who have invested tens of thousands of dollars into solar panels only to find they won't be getting the exorbitant rates they were initially promised. Or worse, they can't connect those panels they spent their life savings on. They're way beyond angry.

The way I see it, thre are two problems with investing in solar and wind. First, these energy sources are not economically viable on their own. Massive taxpayer subsidies are required. Which leads to the second problem, reliance on the government as a partner. And this government is looking less and less like a reliable partner.

Rex Murphy: misery loves company

Gore-Olbermann: never so fruitful a partnership since Gilligan and the Skipper.

The Weather Isn't Getting Weirder

I often hear from otherwise normal, rational, intelligent people how the weather is getting more and more extreme. And that this is proof that we humans have somehow messed up the climate with our carbon emissions. I argue that it isn't so, that the floods, hurricanes, hot spells and even the record cold and snowfalls are not signs of extreme weather brought about by anthropogenic global warming, er climate change. After all, most of the "records" we have been experiencing recently impact only the last 40 or 50 years, a relatively short time span in the historical record and the global climate change business.

That's why it was encouraging to see this study:

The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.

As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."

It is all too easy for climate alarmists to point to recent extremes of weather and cry "we must do something before it's too late". We need to keep in mind that while the weather around the globe can and has been experiencing extremes, this doesn't signify anything out of the historical norm.