£1.3bn Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon officially sunk as developer loses planning appeal

Credit: TLP

Unreliable, ‘poor value for money’ electricity project bites the dust. For now, anyway.
– – –
Plans for the £1.3bn Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon have been dealt a blow by the Court of Appeal, which has ruled that work on the project did not commence within five years of receiving planning approval and therefore the development consent order (DCO) is no longer valid, says New Civil Engineer.

The project, put together by developer Tidal Lagoon (Swansea Bay), was to build the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant. This would span Swansea Bay to form a lagoon between the River Tawe and the River Neath.

The structure would have had 16 turbines producing a up to 320MW per day.

What caused the world’s largest die-off of mangroves? A wobble in the moon’s orbit is partly to blame

2015 Gulf of Carpentaria mangrove die-off, from space [image credit: NASA]

Even the type of local tides was involved. Researchers conclude: we can chalk the 2015 mass death up to “natural causes.”
– – –
Over the summer of 2015, 40 million mangroves died of thirst, says Phys.org.

This vast die-off—the world’s largest ever recorded—killed off rich mangrove forests along fully 1,000 kilometers of coastline on Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria.

The question is, why? Last month, scientists found a culprit: a strong El Niño event, which led to a temporary fall in sea level.

That left mangroves, which rely on tides covering their roots, high and dry during an unusually dry early monsoon season.

Case closed. Or is it?

London’s desalination plant won’t be fired up even if official drought is declared

Beckton desalination plant, London [image credit: Acciona]

Is the plant, which is supposed to run on renewable energy, deemed too expensive to operate except as a last resort, or are there other problems? Hosepipe bans are obviously a cheaper alternative.
– – –
London’s desalination plant won’t be fired up even if official drought is declared, says The Telegraph (via MSN).

It was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 2010 and promised to be the saviour for thousands of Londoners in case of drought.

Twelve years later, its moment arrived during the driest July on record – but the desalination plant in Beckton, east London, was effectively mothballed with no clear date for its resurrection.

The Moon’s climate influence detected by researchers

Image credit: interactivestars.com

Not exactly a new idea, but worth pursuing. Given the present feverish pursuit of supposedly climate-related policies that attempt to counter imagined human-caused effects, all known aspects of natural variation must be highlighted and included in models.
– – –
New analysis suggests that the Moon might be an unappreciated factor in climate change and, according to researchers from the Universities of East Anglia and Reading, its influence “cannot be discounted as an important driver of multidecadal variability of global temperature.”

It’s a suggestion that is bound to prompt debate and a possible reassessment of the relative influence of human factors on climate change in the past and the future when the lunar effect is included, says Dr. David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

It arises from the so-called lunar nodal cycle of 18.6 years caused by variations in the angle of the Moon’s orbital plane. During this period the Moon’s orbit “wobbles” between plus or minus 5 degrees relative to the Earth’s equator.

Reply to Eschenbach’s Meander Through Sun and Wind

Over at WUWT, Willis has been up to his usual trick of mangling data in a vain attempt to discredit scientists who find strong links between the Sun’s variation and Earth’s weather and climatic patterns. This time it’s Le Mouel et al who get the treatment in his ‘analysis’ of their 2010 paper “Solar forcing of the semi‐annual variation of length‐of‐day”

As usual, Willis gets things upside down and then sets up a straw-man argument. He asks: “So … is there a correlation between sunspots and zonal wind speeds?” The answer to which is no, and the paper’s authors never claimed there was. However, as Fig 1 of Le Mouel et al’s paper shows, there is a strong anti-correlation between solar variation and the semi-annual variation of Length of Day (LOD) which is itself well correlated with changes in zonal wind speeds. For obvious reasons, Willis doesn’t show his readers Fig 1, reproduced here for your academic study.

Figure 1. Long‐term variations in the amplitude a of the semiannual oscillation in lod (in blue). A 4‐yr centered sliding
window is used. (a) Comparison of the semiannual amplitude of lod with the sunspot number WN (red); WN is both
reversed in sign and offset by one year (see text). (b) Comparison of the detrended semiannual amplitude of lod (blue) with
the sunspot number WN (red); WN is reversed in sign and offset by one year. (c) Comparison of the semiannual amplitude
of lod (blue) with galactic cosmic ray flux GCR (red); GCR is neither reversed in sign nor offset (see text).

Energy Islands: Orkney’s radical marine power experiment

Mocean Energy’s Blue X wave energy converter at Forth Ports’ Rosyth Docks [image credit: Mocean Energy]

The article title says the experiment ‘is a blueprint for the future’, but tidal power devices have a long record of not exactly becoming a roaring success. When might this future arrive? Talk of being a ‘global leader’ sounds upbeat and optimistic, press-release style, but will there be enough – or any – followers? After the intro, we come to the prototype wave converter.
– – –
We’re standing, it seems, on the deck of a stocky, barge-like boat with yellow trim, going full steam, says the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Water whips past, flicking up foam. But the ‘boat’ is stationary – tethered to the sea floor, it is in fact a 1.5MW tidal energy generator.

Developed by Spanish firm Magallanes Renovables, the ATIR platform has two turbines submerged in the fast-flowing waters of the Fall of Warness, south of the island of Eday in the Orkneys.

The world’s ‘most powerful tidal turbine’ launches in Scotland

They keep trying, but tidal turbines have yet to make it to the big league in terms of competing with established alternatives like wind turbines. The report calls it a vessel.
– – –
Scottish floating tidal turbine technology provider Orbital Marine Power has successfully launched its 2MW tidal turbine, the Orbital O2, from the Port of Dundee , reports insider.co.uk.

The operation was managed by Osprey Heavy Lift and saw the 680-tonne tidal turbine transferred from the Forth Ports quayside facility in Dundee into the River Tay using a submersible barge.

The launch marks the completion of the turbine build, managed by TEXO Fabrication, and the O2 will now be towed to the Orkney Islands, where it will undergo commissioning before being connected to the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), becoming the world’s most powerful operational tidal turbine.

Tidal turbine project for Welsh ‘blue energy island’ (population: 11) gets £1.2m funding

Bardsey island

Cost per head: over £100,000. Four of the eleven (2019 data) even reside there in winter, when they should be able to enjoy the output of a turbine each with one to spare, in theory. The island is only one mile long.
– – –
The Welsh island of Ynys Enlli could ditch its dependency on diesel to become the world’s first ‘blue energy island’ thanks to a new tidal energy project, reports the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

Nova Innovation has secured an investment of £1.2m from the Welsh government through the European Regional Development Fund for its Enlli project in north Wales.

The installation will generate electricity from the natural ebb and flow of the tide between Ynys Enlli – also known as Bardsey Island – and the mainland of the Llŷn Peninsula.

Jupiter’s ocean moons raise tides on each other

Credit: NASA [click on image to enlarge]

The effects of relative proximity between these large moons seem to have been underrated. Not forgetting that Jupiter does have a big effect on Io, the closest Galilean moon to it.
– – –
Jupiter’s “ocean world” moons may have strong gravitational effects on each other, raising big tides in each others’ subsurface seas, a new study suggests [Space.com reporting].

Surprisingly, these moon-moon tidal forces might generate more heat in the satellites’ oceans than the gravitational tugs of giant Jupiter, study team members found.

“That’s kind of interesting, because Jupiter is the biggest mass in that system, so its tidal forces are much bigger than one moon on another,” lead author Hamish Hay, who performed the work while at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said in a statement.

Mysterious lights seen: Geomagnetic Link to earthquakes?

This twitter video caught my eye last night, it was taken near Miami a few nights ago. It shows mysterious lights, confirmed from many sources and featured on national US TV channels where it’s reported answers are being demanded from the Pentagon.

https://twitter.com/miami_wtf/status/1275870311506939907

Then today my physicist friend Mike McCulloch posted a tweet about some similar phenomena which have been observed for many years in Norway.

A proof of De Rop’s long-term lunar cycle (1799 anomalistic years)

Credit: NASA

The idea is to validate Belgian astronomer Willy de Rop’s 1971 calculations, which can be found here.

From our 2016 post discussing his paper, De Rop’s long-term lunar cycle:

De Rop’s basic premise is that there’s a correlation between the so-called ‘lunar wobble’ period and the anomalistic year.
His paper contains a geometric proof, and the final numbers are:
300 lunar wobbles in 1799 anomalistic years (the lunar wobble is known to repeat in just under 6 years).

To see what the lunar wobble is, refer to the paper. Essentially it’s when the number of lunar apsidal and nodal cycles in the period sums to 1. For more information, please refer to that post.

Venice canals almost run dry just two months after flooding

Low tide in Venice

This so-called man-made climate change thing must be a versatile beast, if it exists outside of myths. Wednesday’s rare super blue blood moon gets some of the blame here, but recent low rainfall also played a part.

Although the water levels in the city’s famous canals rise and fall with the tide, exceptionally low tides have left canals bare, reports Sky News.

Two months ago the high tide in Venice peaked at 187cm (6.14ft), leaving around 70% of the lagoon city centre under salt water.

No, Venice isn’t flooding due to climate change

Another Venice flood

H/T Climate Change Dispatch

A similar flood in 1966 gives the lie to the latest alarmist claims. In any case, everyone knows Venice has been sinking for centuries.
– – –
Venice is flooded – again – and its mayor Luigi Brugnaro is blaming climate change.

Except that’s rubbish, says James Delingpole.

This has become the standard dog-ate-my-homework excuse for desperate politicians and administrators who want to dodge their responsibilities while simultaneously attracting media sympathy and aid money.

Liverpool: huge tidal power plant on the Mersey could make city a renewable energy hotspot

Map of the Manchester Ship Canal (= blue line)
[click on map to enlarge]

H/T TechXplore

Sounds expensive. But as Liverpool is near the start of the Manchester Ship Canal any barrage should have low impact on shipping, in theory at least. As far as a ‘climate emergency’ is concerned, I’ve lived near the Mersey for a long time and haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary with the weather – so far at least 😐

Liverpool has declared a climate emergency, says The Conversation.

The mayors of both the city itself and the surrounding “city region” have recognised the emergency, and both have suggested that a tidal barrage on the River Mersey could form part of the solution.

And on a recent visit to the city, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would support the £3.5 billion project.

Two years ago, I teamed up with colleagues at the National Oceanography Centre and University of Liverpool to look at how to realise the River Mersey’s energy potential: we concluded that a tidal power station could be part of the solution.

So what actually is a “tidal barrage”, and why do we think the Mersey is so suitable?

Floating island of 1,000 homes part of revived Swansea tidal project

Dead in the water: the original Swansea tidal lagoon plan [image credit: BBC]

At a mere(?) one billion pounds it would be 30% cheaper than the original proposal, or so the claim goes. The sales pitch mentions some of the usual suspects like sustainability and climate change. But somebody still has to pay for the expensive power it might generate.

The Dragon Energy Island project would generate a combination of marine, solar and hydrogen energy, says EnergyLiveNews.

A floating island of up to 1,000 homes and shops is part of a new proposal to revive the Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon project in Wales.

Called Dragon Energy Island , the project would consist of giant underwater turbines that would power thousands of homes across Swansea and beyond, a floating modular homes development, underwater data centre, a solar farm and the production of hydrogen.

Moonquakes rattle the Moon as it shrinks like a raisin

View from the Moon [credit: NASA]

Moons don’t generally ‘shrink’, so what’s going on here? The abstract of the research paper speaks of compressional stresses, but the only potential source of compression would seem to be the Earth. It’s known that ‘the crust on the far side is a lot thicker than it is on the near side’, as discussed here.

The moon is still tectonically active, like Earth, generating moonquakes as our planet creates earthquakes, a new study based on Apollo mission data found.

These moonquakes likely happen because the moon is quivering as it shrinks, researchers added.

On Earth, tectonic activity, such as earthquakes and volcanism, results from shuffling of the crust’s tectonic plates driven by the churning of the planet’s molten interior, says Charles Quoi at Space.com.

However, the moon is much smaller than Earth and therefore largely cooled off long ago, so one might not expect much, if any, tectonic activity.

Miami’s affluent ‘climate refugees’ seek higher ground

All the climate propaganda is getting to some people it seems. In this case they’re not taking any chances – the ‘hills’ they are heading for turn out to be in ‘some parts as much as 11 feet (3.35 meters) above sea level’. At least they should have a commanding view of the coast. 😎

Climate change is prompting Miami’s rich to abandon the oceanfront and head for the hills, says DW.com.

That’s bad news for the people of Little Haiti, a ridge-top immigrant community suddenly sitting on hot property.

How life could help atmospheric tides slow a planet’s rotation

Layers of Earth’s atmosphere

Some fairly advanced theorising here, but the possibilities look interesting. For example, could ‘resonant trapping’ exist?

Resonating oscillations of a planet’s atmosphere caused by gravitational tides and heating from its star could prevent a planet’s rotation from steadily slowing over time, according to new research by Caleb Scharf, who is the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University.

His findings suggest that the effect is enhanced for a planet with an atmosphere that has been oxygenated by life, and the resulting ‘atmospheric tides’ could even act as a biosignature, reports Phys.org.

Ian Wilson: A Severe Case of Cognitive Dissonance

[For details on the graph see below]

Update 12/11/2018: Ian Wilson’s 2019 El Nino forecast can be found here.

Cognitive Dissonance: When a person or a group of people have attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that are in conflict with each other. Generally, this produces a feeling of mental discomfort that leads to an alteration in their attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that moderates their mental discomfort and restores balance.

I believe that the level of cognitive dissonance that we have about the influence of lunar tides upon El Nino events has become so large that something has to give.

In a series of blog posts in November 2014:

http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2014/11/evidence-that-strong-el-nino-events-are_13.html

I showed that between 1870 and 2025, the precise alignments between the lunar synodic [phase] cycle and the 31/62 year Perigean New/Full moon cycle, naturally breaks up into six 31-year epochs each of which has a distinctly different tidal property. Note that the second of these 31-year intervals starts with the precise alignment on the 15th of April 1870, with the subsequent epoch boundaries occurring every 31 years after that:

Epoch 1 – Prior to 15th April  1870
Epoch 2 – 15th April 1870 to 18th April 1901
Epoch 3 – 8th April 1901 to 20th April 1932
Epoch 4 – 20th April 1932 to 23rd April 1963
Epoch 5 – 23rd April 1963 to 25th April 1994
Epoch 6 – 25th April 1994 to 27th April 2025

I claimed that if the 31/62-year seasonal tidal cycle plays a role in sequencing the triggering of El Niño events, it would be reasonable to expect that its effects for the following three epochs:

Ocean tide size linked to supercontinent cycle

A new tweak to tidal theory is proposed. The research team hopes that ‘understanding continental configurations and tidal strengths will impact the development of climate models’.

Daily tides are driven primarily by Earth’s rotation and the gravitational force of the moon on oceans, says Earth magazine.

However, in a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers suggest that tidal magnitudes are also influenced, on longer timescales, by the size and shape of the ocean basins, and are therefore driven by plate tectonics.

Plate tectonics gives rise to the formation of supercontinents — massive aggregations of continental lithosphere — which form and break apart in cycles that last about 400 million to 500 million years. With the breakup of the last supercontinent, Pangea, about 180 million years ago, and the projected formation of a new supercontinent, known as Aurica, in about 200 million years, Earth is currently in the middle of a supercontinent cycle.

Because the size and shape of ocean basins impact ocean circulation and tides, researchers led by Mattias Green, a physical oceanographer at Bangor University in England, hypothesized that tides may be linked to the supercontinent cycle in a so-called supertidal cycle.

Current tides, particularly those in the North Atlantic, are very large, Green’s team noted because of tidal resonance, which occurs when ocean basins and continental shelves reinforce and amplify the natural oscillation of tides as they sweep back and forth across oceans. “So the tides are larger at present because the continents are configured the way they are.”

To model Earth’s future oceanic tides, the researchers used predictions of continental configurations for the next 250 million years, through when Aurica is predicted to form. Ocean basin size was the main factor considered in the modeling, but the team also accounted for the moon’s gravitational pull on the oceans, Earth’s axial tilt, and simplified ocean bathymetries for future plate tectonic reconstructions.

Simplification of these fine details does affect the team’s modeling, notes David Waltham, a mathematical geologist at the Royal Holloway University of London, who was not involved in the study. But the simplifications used likely do not change the overall results, he adds.

Green and his colleagues reported that global tides are likely to increase over the next 50 million years “due to an enhanced tide in the North Atlantic and Pacific at 25 million years, followed by a very large Pacific tide at 50 million years.”

Continued here.