CO2 Mitigation: It’s Dopey

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Consider the Oldbury wind turbine, installed a couple of years ago by the local authorities of Sandwell in the English Midlands at a cost of £5000 sterling plus Vicious Additional Taxation (a hideously complicated and thus easily evaded EU version of Danegeld, as we historians call it) at the then 17.5% rate (it’s now a bargain-basement 20%, so you get more in return for your missing-trader fraud than you did before).

As WattsUpWithThat.com has recently revealed, in the first full year of the Oldbury White Elephant’s 20-year life it generated a gratifying 209 KWh of electricity — enough to power a single 100W reading lamp for less than three months. The rest of the year you’ll have to find something else to do in bed.

Gross revenue for the year, at 11p/KWh, was, um … almost £23. Assuming that there are no costs of finance, installation, insurance, or maintenance, and after subtracting 20 years’ revenue at last year’s rate, the net undiscounted and unamortized capital cost of the project, as we financiers call it, is U.S. $8935.

Even this figure understates the true cost, because the UK has hidden much of the cost of its climate measures behind a calculatedly complex web of levies, taxes, charges, subsidies, and — above all — behind a furtive near-doubling of the true cost of electricity to pay vast subsidies (“yacht money,” as we landowners call it) to anyone connected with windmills. The website of the King Canute Department amusingly calls this “transparency.”

How much “global warming” will Jumbo the Albino forestall? While it is in operation, it will generate 209,000/365/24, or almost 24 W on average: just about enough to drive an electric toothbrush, which we doctors recommend. Mean UK electricity consumption, according to the Ministry of Transparency, is 43.2 GW. Electricity contributes one-third of UK carbon emissions, and the UK contributes 1.5% of world emissions. So the proportion p of global carbon dioxide emissions that the Witless Windmill will forestall is 24 / 43,200,000,000 / 3 x 0.015, or 2.76 x 10–12, or, as we mathematicians call it, a quantity vanishingly different from zero.

Today’s CO2 concentration is 390 ppmv. Instead of the 438 ppmv CO2 concentration that the IPCC predicts for 2030 on its A2 scenario, thanks to the Wonder Whirligig it will be 438 – p(438 – 390), or, well, as we statisticians call it, a smidgen of a tad below 438 ppmv.

Bear with me, as we call-center operatives say. IPeCaC (2007, p. 803, table 10.26) says 8 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing from CO2 and other bad, bad things will cause 3.4 Celsius (p. 13, table SPM.3) of “global warming” between 2000 and 2100 (progress to date: 0.0 Celsius).

That gives us what we climate scientists call the “centennial-scale transient climate-sensitivity parameter,” which is 3.4/8, or 0.425 C/W/m2. We multiply this by 5.35, the coefficient in what we radiative-transfer modelers call the CO2 forcing equation (Myhre et al., 1998), to give the “centennial-scale transient global-warming coefficient” n = 2.27375.