Dr. Conca reports that last week, twenty-one prominent scientists issued a sharp critique to one of their own scientists. Mark Jacobson of Stanford said America could easily become 100% renewable by mid-century, but refused to acknowledge sound scientific principles in his research and address major errors pointed out by the scientific community. And then he played politics.\n\nThe critique is so unusual that the group of scientists only decided to issue it when Jacobson refused to correct obvious scientific errors even as he began to seriously influence public policy and political action.\n\nJacobson published a paper in 2015 that claimed we could get rid of all other energy sources except wind and solar, and a tiny bit of other renewables, by 2050, and that it would be easier and cheaper than any other alternative mix.
The paper was a redo of one Jacobson wrote in 2009 and published in Scientific American, again without any real scientific peer-review.\n\nThe Jacobson claim is at complete odds with serious analyses and assessments, including those performed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the International Energy Agency, and most of academia. These other proposed energy mixes recognize the importance of energy diversity. They still contain huge amounts of renewables, but they also have significant amounts of nuclear, hydro and even some natural gas. There is a good reason why nuclear was unaffected by the last Polar Vortex when everything else was shutting down.\n\nPublished in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the same journal as the original paper, the reader can go over the rebuttal by these twenty-one scientists, and the original paper by Jacobson, at their leisure. The details are not as important as the ideological issue and the break with the scientific method.
Original URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/06/26/debunking-the-unscientific-fantasy-of-100-renewables/#6d947fa929f9
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