Will reduced solar activity counteract global warming in the coming decades? That is what outgoing German electric utility executive Fritz Vahrenholt claims in a new book. In an interview with SPIEGEL, he argues that the official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science.
The articulate utility executive is nervous at the beginning of the conversation. He is groping for words — not a common occurrence for the practiced provocateur. After all, Fritz Vahrenholt, 62, who holds a doctorate in chemistry, has been a rebel throughout his life. “Perhaps it’s just part of my generation,” he says.
He is typical of someone who came of age during the student protest movement of the late 1960s, and who fought against the chemical industry’s toxic manufacturing plants in the 1970s. His party, Germany’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), chose him as environment senator in the city-state of Hamburg, where he incurred the wrath of the environmental lobby by building a waste incineration plant, earning him the nickname “Feuerfritze” (Fire Fritz). He worked in industry after that, first for oil multinational Shell and then for wind turbine maker RePower, which he helped develop. Now, as the outgoing CEO of the renewable energy group RWE Innogy, he is about to embark on his next major battle. “I’m going to make enemies in all camps,” he says.
He wants to break a taboo. “The climate catastrophe is not occurring,” he writes in his book “Die Kalte Sonne” (The Cold Sun), published by Hoffmann and Campe, which will be in bookstores next week.
He has only given the book to one climatologist, Jochem Marotzke, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, to read prior to its publication. Marotzke’s assessment is clear: Vahrenholt represents the standpoints of climate skeptics. “A number of the hypotheses in the book were refuted long ago,” Marotzke claims, but adds, on a self-critical note, that his profession has neglected to explain that global temperatures will not increase uniformly. Instead, says Marotzke, there could also be phases of stagnation and even minor declines in temperature. “This has exposed us to potential criticism,” he says.
While books by climate heretics usually receive little attention, it could be different in Vahrenholt’s case. “His fame,” says Marotzke, “will ensure that there will be a debate on the issue.”
The book is a source of discomfort within Vahrenholt’s party. No one with the SPD leadership is willing to comment on the theories of their prominent fellow party member, from former Environment Minister and current SPD Chairman Sigmar Gabriel to parliamentary floor leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was given an advance copy of the book.
The polar ice caps aren’t melting as fast as earlier projections suggested:
While vast quantities of ice melting into the ocean is not exactly good news, Wahr says, according to his team’s estimates, about 30 percent less ice is melting than previously thought.
The team used data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite, which was launched as a joint project between NASA and Germany in 2002. The GRACE satellite measures gravity, which is related to mass, in 20 distinct regions worldwide. Wahr says that gives the team more accurate estimates, because previous teams had to measure ice loss at “a few easily accessible glaciers” and then extrapolate it to the 200,000 glaciers worldwide.
“It’s tough to get an estimate [with previous methods],” he says.
With GRACE, the team can measure wide swaths of the earth, giving them a more complete picture. “It was time to do a complete global inventory,” he says. Although the team used eight years of GRACE’s data, Wahr says it’s important to realize that melting patterns are hard to predict.
And here’s the kicker:
“Even with an eight-year estimate, it’s not clear how far into the future you can project,” he says. “A lot of people want to predict into the end of the century, but I think it’s too dangerous to do that … We don’t have enough info to know what’ll happen. There’s some ebb and flow to these things.”
Guantánamo — the place with the prison camps — is going green
Better known for its experiment in offshore detention, interrogation and military justice, Guantánamo is also a lab for environmental exploration.
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Solar-powered lights serve as sentries where U.S. Marines once faced-off along the Cuban frontier. A team of Navy cops now rides bikes rather than gas-guzzling patrol cars in the searing Caribbean sunshine.
In this remote corner of Cuba that is better known as a lab for Pentagon justice and interrogation, the U.S. Navy has been quietly engaging in more low-profile offshore experimentation — seeking environmentally friendly alternatives to reduce its whopping $100,000-a-day fossil fuel dependence.
It’s a Navy-wide goal to halve dependence on fossil fuels by 2020. But the greening of Gitmo, as this base is known, comes with a particular challenge.
The base that today houses 6,000 people makes all its own electricity and desalinates its own water. It has done so ever since the 1960s when Rear Adm. John Bulkeley, then base commander, faced down Fidel Castro and cut off the naval station from Cuba’s water and power supply.
Everything from diesel fuel to spare parts arrives by ship or aircraft, more than tripling the price of power, according to base estimates.
“From my perspective certainly the greening of Gitmo is important,” says U.S. Navy Capt. Kirk Hibbert, the base commander. National security is paramount, he said, but the Navy mandate to curb consumption “has an effect on almost everything we do here.”
I hear they even use recycled water while waterboarding nowadays. The rest here.
I guess freezing Europeans don’t care so much about the CO2 emissions of the helicopters bringing them food. Maybe they think they’re flying wind-turbines coming to save the day?
Helicopters ferried food and medicine to iced-in villagers on Wednesday as Europe’s 12-day-old cold snap tightened its frigid grip on the continent, where more than 400 have died as a direct result.
Eastern countries such as Poland and Ukraine account for more than half this total, and dozens more have succumbed to the weather’s secondary effects, such as asphyxiation by shoddy heating.
Heavy snows eased in Bosnia but the bitter cold continued, especially in the south and southeast, where temperatures dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit.)
Thousands struggled without power, including around the historic city of Mostar, where some 15,000 homes lacked electricity.
Uma Sinanovic, a spokeswoman for Bosnia’s defence ministry, said areas around Nevesinje and Berkovici in the country’s south were especially hard hit.
And if Eli doesn’t like his new Vette, he can stroll over to New York’s auto show this April and sign up for the resurrected, earth-shaking, 660 hp SRT Viper being introduced by Fiat’s Sergio Marchionne. Yes, the same Fiat that Obama brought to the USA to “civilize” Chrysler’s heathens with the tiny Fiat 500. Oh, the irony.
The Obama administration likes to say that its “investment” of taxpayer dollars in electric cars is helping America build a foundation to compete in the new global auto race, but the Energy Department’s bet looks more like a house of cards. The latest Ace turned Joker is the Think electric car plant in Indiana — owned by a bankrupt, government-funded, Norwegian-based electric car company.
That bankruptcy is a key reason Think Global supplier Ener1 — the Energy Department-supported battery maker — went bankrupt last month to follow Solyndra and Beacon Power into the government Hall of Shame.
The idled plant in Elkhart, Indiana (with 100 tiny Think electrics sitting unfinished), is more evidence of Big Government’s bad bets — and the fact that such bets are bipartisan. Think and Ener1 had received millions not only in federal incentives but also in state dollars from Indiana’s Republican governor, Mitch Daniels.
“We’ve said we’re out to make Indiana the electric vehicle state. It’s beginning to look like the state capital will be Elkhart County,” Daniels said a year ago when brokering state taxpayers into the battery boondoggle business.
Incredibly, the feds and Daniels invested in this boondoggle despite Think’s checkered history and four — count ‘em, FOUR — bankruptcies.
Indeed, Ford first brought Think to the U.S. in 2000 with a splashy debut at the Detroit Auto Show, showcasing it as the city car of the future. But Ford quickly offloaded the Norwegian boat anchor in 2003 after which it has flirted with crony capitalists from GE to Tesla who helped secure enough government grants to keep it alive.
A quick look at the Think’s specs and it’s apparent that taxpayers are being taken for suckers. The Think is a two-seater no bigger than a Smart car with a top speed of 65 mph and a price tag of — wait for it — $38,000 (before the federal $7,500 tax credit, natch).
That’s a deal only a government could love.
“Where’s the value?” Gregg Fore, an Elkhart recreational-vehicle-industry executive, told the Chicago Tribune. “I could buy a golf cart for five grand if that’s what I wanted to drive.”
How much Think has cost taxpayers is unknown as Indiana’s Economic Development Corp. and Ener1 insist that the funding is confidential despite its public origin. What is known is that EnerDel, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ener1 had already burned through $55 million if a $118 DOE grant in making batteries for the little tin can.
For now, Think is dead in the water. At least until it finds another government sucker.
The gas-guzzling, earth-pawing 2005 Chrysler 300C Hemi that Barack Obama owned when he ripped Detroit automakers in 2007 for not making more fuel-sipping hybrids failed to sell on eBay this week for its minimum $1 million asking price.
No wonder. Obama’s brand has plummeted because he isn’t what he promised to be. And the Hemi 300C is surely evidence of that.
This is the self-proclaimed greenest president in history. The president who promised that his election was the “moment that the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” You might pay a million for The Messiah’s first Volt. But his first muscle car? Jesus drove a Hemi?
The Volt isn’t selling. The 300C isn’t selling. And neither is Barack Obama.
