Achgut-Lesern wäre das nicht passiert: Großkonzerne wie Siemens und Bosch kehren der Solarbranche den Rücken. Ihre Strategien mündeten im Debakel - die Engagements in Sonnenstrom-Unternehmen kosteten Milliarden.

Global sea surface temperatures are at about +0.15 deg C for the week centered on June 12th, compared to the base years of 1971-2000. Sure does look as though global sea surface temperature anomalies are going to need another very strong El Niño event to get them to warm. Other than the rises and falls in response to El Niño and La Niña events, it doesn’t look as though global sea surface temperatures have wandered very far from an anomaly of +0.2 deg C over the past 12-plus years.

FDP-Fraktionschef Rainer Brüderle hat sich für einen Sofortstopp aller Subventionen für Öko-Strom ausgesprochen. “Das Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz gehört grundlegend reformiert. Und bis dahin sollten ab sofort keine neuen Windräder und Solaranlagen mehr ans Netz gelassen werden”, sagte Brüderle der in Düsseldorf erscheinenden “Rheinischen Post”. “Es ist Zeit, die Reißleine zu ziehen.” Eine grundlegende EEG-Reform müsse eine der ersten Maßnahmen einer wiedergewählten christlich-liberalen Koalition sein, so Brüderle.

They were dying before the Syrian civil war broke out and before the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Cairo. Syria has an insoluble civil war and Egypt has an insoluble crisis because they are dying. They are dying because they chose not to do what China did: move the better part of a billion people from rural backwardness to a modern urban economy within a generation. Mexico would have died as well, without the option to send its rural poor - fully one-fifth of its population - to the United States.

Egypt remains a pre-modern society, with nearly 50% illiteracy, a 30% rate of consanguineal marriage, a 90% rate of female genital mutilation, and an un- or underemployment rate over 40%. Syria has neither enough oil nor water to maintain the bazaar economy dominated by the Assad family…

Even if the Sunnis could eject the Assad family

Despite a decade and a half without temperature rise, climate scientists still stubbornly stick to their predictions of steadily increasing global temperatures. These predictions are all based on GCM, computer programs that model the circulation of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans and a myriad of other factors in an attempt to simulate our planet’s climate system. The problem is, the computer models are severely flawed, flawed at such a fundamental level that two climate modelers have called for a reassessment of all computer models currently in use. Sadly, a number of the flaws they point out have been known to scientists for decades, yet mainstream climate science continues to rely on these broken models, hoping to get lucky with predictions made for the wrong reasons.

The wheels are falling off of Germany’s green energy revolution. In recent years Europe has attempted to position itself as a first mover and global leader in renewable energy, and Germany has led the way with ambitious domestic programs to boost solar and wind energy. But green hopes are giving way to economic realities. Germany’s struggles should be a warning to leaders and policymakers around the world. Renewable energy isn’t ready for primetime, and no amount of government subsidies or green pie-in-the-sky hopes are going to change that.

The Economist: Germany’s Energiewende bodes ill for the country’s European leadership. Businessmen say it will kill German industry. Power experts worry about blackouts. Voters are furious about ever higher fuel bills. The chaos undermines Germany’s claim to efficiency, threatens its vaunted competitiveness and unnecessarily burdens households. It also demonstrates Germany’s curious refusal to think about Europe strategically.

Data from Munich Re and the United Nations. The graph shows a ratio of global weather-related disaster losses to global GDP expressed in 2011 dollars and calculated at market exchange rates. For a peer reviewed analysis which goes into some depth on this subject, see this Munich Re-funded study: E. Neumayer and F. Barthel. 2011. Normalizing Economic Loss from Natural Disasters: A Global Analysis, Global Environmental Change, 21:13-24 (here in PDF). They conclude: “there is no evidence so far that climate change has increased the normalized economic loss from natural disasters.”