Tallbloke talks climategate with the BBC

I got a phone call from a nice lady called Sally at the BBC a few weeks ago. Would I be prepared to take part in a programme about climategate? After bending her ear for 45 minutes I asked her to email me an outline of what the programme was going to cover so I could decide whether or not I wanted to be involved.

After due consideration, I agreed to be interviewed, but the timing was such that I’d be abroad, and we’d have to conduct it via WhatsApp. To ensure decent voice quality, I offered to record the interview locally using another phone and send them the file afterwards. This of course means I have a permanent record of the full interview, and it’ll be fun to have a talkshop sweepstake on how many seconds of it will survive the editors scissors. Here’s the full 23 minutes.

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In Earth’s highest atmospheric layers, space weather can really heat things up

Credit: NASA

Report: ‘With its steady stream of temperature measurements, GOLD is painting a picture of an upper atmosphere much more sensitive to the magnetic conditions around Earth than previously thought.’ Interesting – does this impact climate models?
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New results from NASA satellite data show that space weather—the changing conditions in space driven by the sun—can heat up Earth’s hottest and highest atmospheric layer, says Phys.org.

The findings, published in July in Geophysical Research Letters, used data from NASA’s Global Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD mission. Launched in 2018 aboard the SES-14 communications satellite, GOLD looks down on Earth’s upper atmosphere from what’s known as geosynchronous orbit, effectively “hovering” over the western hemisphere as Earth turns.

GOLD’s unique position gives it a stable view of one entire face of the globe—called the disk—where it scans the temperature of Earth’s upper atmosphere every 30 minutes. GOLD scans the thermosphere from a position in geostationary orbit, which stays over one particular spot on Earth as it orbits and the planet rotates.

“We found results that were not previously possible because of the kind of data that we get from GOLD,” said Fazlul Laskar, who led the research. Dr. Laskar is a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Study: Fossil fuel plans would far overshoot climate goals

Wyoming coal trains [image credit: energycatalyzer3.com/

Welcome to the real world. The UN loves to tell the world to wind down its fuel-burning ways in a hurry to satisfy the atmospheric trace gas theories of certain ‘climate experts’, but equally viable and affordable alternatives on the scale required are proving hard to find. Energy being ‘clean’ or not is a different issue, but a useful prop when your main argument is floundering.
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The world needs to cut by more than half its production of coal, oil and gas in the coming decade to maintain a chance of keeping global warming from reaching dangerous levels, according to a U.N.-backed study released Wednesday, says Phys.org.

The report published by the U.N. Environment Program found that while governments have made ambitious pledges to curb greenhouse gas emissions, they are still planning to extract double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than what would be consistent with the 2015 Paris climate accord’s goal of keeping the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

Coal And Oil Continue Domination: Unexpected Demand Creates Global Energy Havoc

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When the energy going gets tough…coal, gas and oil get going.

PA Pundits - International

By Vijay Raj Jayaraj~

Coal is no longer the king. Era of Oil is over. Our economies will be Carbon neutral.

These are some of the common claims that you might have heard or read in the mainstream media.

Many people truly believe that our economies are being decarbonized and getting rid of the dirty coal and evil oil. This is because they have been informed so.

However, the ground reality is strikingly different. Not only are fossil fuels still leading the energy mix, their prospects are stronger than ever.

The post-pandemic economic recovery has sent the fuel demand skyrocketing across the globe. Coal and Oil–the two most used energy resources are in high demand and their prices have touched record highs.

Unfortunately, many nations were caught off-guard, partly because of the unexpected pace of economic recovery and partly due to misleading projections about coal and oil demand.

Early…

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Gulf Stream and Kuroshio Current found to be synchronized on decadal time scale

Credit: NOAA

Researchers propose another weather/climate cycle.
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A team of researchers with members affiliated with a large number of institutions across Japan has found that the Gulf stream and Kuroshio are synchronized on a decadal time scale, says Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of decades of weather satellite data and the link between the two ocean currents.

Paola Cessi, with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, has published a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in Japan in the same journal issue.

Modi & Johnson to launch global solar power grid

Nyngan solar plant, Australia [image credit: Wikipedia]

They’re going to have to do a lot of digging for all those solar panel ingredients. Try not to make too much mess chaps, and let’s keep quiet about all the ‘carbon’ emitted in the process. Climate fantasies rumble on.
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NEW DELHI: India and the United Kingdom will jointly launch the Green Grids Initiative-One Sun One World One Grid (GGI-OSOWOG) — a trans-national grid to transport solar power to different countries — during world leaders’ summit at the beginning of the 26th session of the UN climate change conference (COP26) in Glasgow, UK in the first week of November, says the Times of India.

The initiative, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi three years ago, will be endorsed in the form of a political declaration by the fourth general assembly of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) during October 18-21.

Sources said Modi would attend the world leaders’ summit on November 1-2 at COP26 and launch it with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in presence of other heads of state/government. An official confirmation to this effect would be conveyed to the UK soon, they added.

A Volcanic Comet Blows its Top

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But what kind of volcanoes? One researcher has a theory.

Spaceweather.com

Oct. 14, 2021: So you think you know what a comet is? Think again. Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann is challenging old ideas. Astronomers call it a comet, but, really, “giant space volcano” might be a better description. It’s a 60-km-wide ball of ice orbiting the Sun beyond Jupiter, and it appears to be one of the most volcanically active bodies in the entire Solar System.

Comet 29P just blew its top … again. In late September 2021, 29P erupted 4 times in quick succession, blowing shells of “cryomagma” into space. Arizona amateur astronomer Eliot Herman has been monitoring the debris:

“Initially it looked like a bright compact object,” says Herman. “Now the expanding cloud is 1.3 arcminutes wide (bigger than Jupiter) and sufficiently transparent for background stars to shine through.”

When this object was discovered in 1927, astronomers thought they had found a fairly run-of-the-mill comet, unusual mainly because it was trapped…

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Q&A: La Niña’s back

The report speaks of ‘La Niña’s natural cooling’ causing drought and increasing wildfire hazards in some areas. Weren’t such things supposed to be aggravated by alleged human-caused global warming, not by natural cooling effects?
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For the second straight year, the world heads into a new La Niña weather event, says Phys.org.

This would tend to dry out parts of an already parched and fiery American West and boost an already busy Atlantic hurricane season.

Just five months after the end of a La Niña that started in September 2020, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a new cooling of the Pacific is underway.

Arctic Ice Already Exceeds Six Wadhams

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Attention COP26 attendees! Please refrain from flogging the dead horse of terminal Arctic sea ice decline.

Science Matters

The images above come from MASIE showing ice extents starting day 266, the lowest daily extent in 2021. Over the last 18 days, Arctic ice has grown by 1 Wadham (1M km2) to now exceed 6 Wadhams, about 276k km2 greater than the 14-year average for day 284. At the bottom center Barents Sea ice reaches out to Iceland.  Svalbard bottom right becomes encircled by ice.  East Siberian Sea top right has ice connecting to the shore. Top center Beaufort and Chukchi seas are also adding ice rapidly.

The ice recovery since September minimum is shown in the graph below.

Day 260 was the 14 year average annual daily minimum at 4.39m km2. MASIE 2021 was 776k km2 above average, and SII was 427k km2 lower than MASIE.  Note that 2007, 2019 and 2020 weere much lower than average throughout the period. SII is again tracking MASIE since day 274.

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Environment Agency’s alarmist climate report is partly based on an obsolete climate scenario

An obvious problem with the new Environment Agency report reportis its use of climate scenario RCP8.5, which has been widely discredited as unrealistic, impossible and so on. Surely that ought to render any related comments unsuitable as advice to a government. EA report extracts follow.
Air temperature and precipitation: We used RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 to represent climate scenarios that meet or exceed global warming +2°C and +4°C above pre-industrial by 2100.
Sea level rise: For our FCERM schemes we assess a range from the 70th to the 95th percentile of UKCP18 RCP8.5.
River flows: They are relative to a 1981-200 baseline and based on the 50th percentile of UKCP18 RCP8.5, which is consistent with at least a +4°C warming scenario by the end of the century.
Future weather: The projected values for future hot weather and wet weather are taken from UKCP Local (2.2 km) (Met Office, 2019), which complements the UKCP18 projections with data at a higher spatial and temporal resolution than previous climate projections, giving us greater detail on the 52 of 90 frequency and intensity of extreme weather. These projections are only available for a RCP8.5
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The Environment Agency has issued a stark warning on climate change: “Adapt or die”, says ITV News.

In a new report the Government body has preparations need to be made for the inevitable effects of climate change such as more flooding, an increased number of droughts and rising sea levels.

British TV’s COP26 climate change soap opera

Credit: list.co.uk

All aboard the rickety climate bandwagon, destination Glasgow. Soap operas being vehicles for government propaganda – that’s never happened before, surely (cough)? Reality will just be that over-long gap between episodes. Or watch something else.
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For the first time in British television history, the country’s soaps and continuing dramas have joined forces to highlight the issue of climate change and environmental issues, says itv.com.

Casualty, Coronation Street, Doctors, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Holby City and Hollyoaks have each filmed scenes, or have references, to cover different aspects of climate change and, in a soap first, five of the soaps will also be referencing each other as each drama will also give a nod to another.

Drax shares tumble after its ‘renewable energy’ power plant is found to be Britain’s worst CO2 emitter

Drax power station, generating 7% of Britain’s needs, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips.

Biomass has been rumbled in the City. Unlucky! But what took them so long to see through the climate hype?
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The City of London feeds off rumours and yesterday Drax was the name on the tip of every trader’s tongue, says the Daily Mail (via Thisismoney).

The energy company saw its shares tumble 5.3 per cent, or 27p, to 483p amid talk in the market that one of the world’s most powerful money managers had blacklisted the stock.

New study confirms Sun/Cosmic-Ray climate connection

Credit: Institute of Physics

This looks like progress, although more research will be needed to try to better understand how the relevant effects work in practice.
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A new study published in Nature Scientific Reports by researchers at the Danish National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests that the Sun’s activity in screening cosmic rays affects clouds and, ultimately, the Earth’s energy budget with concomitant climatic effects, says David Whitehouse @ NetZeroWatch.

This research, by Henrik Svensmark, Jacob Svensmark, Martin Bødker Enghoff, and Nir Shaviv supports 25 years of discoveries that point to a significant role for cosmic rays in climate change.

Energy crisis: The GWPF launches Net Zero Watch

Attempts to turn ‘net zero’ fantasies into reality are going to hit the public even harder than they already do, financially and in practical ways too. And all for what?
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As the energy crisis in Britain and Europe worsens, it is becoming ever more evident that current climate and energy policies are failing, and the public is paying the price, says Dr Benny Peiser of The GWPF (Global Warming Policy Forum).

Net Zero Watch is here to provide serious analysis of naïve and un-costed decarbonisation policies.

Our new campaign and website will shake the tree; scrutinising policies, establishing what they really cost, determining who will be forced to pay, and exploring affordable alternatives.

At Net Zero Watch, readers (and subscribers to our newsletter) will be able to examine the full spectrum of views and critical analysis, enabling our readers to access a credible reality check of official and alternative climate and energy policy research.

Why fast charging reduces the capacity of a car battery

Image credit: BBC

Imagine having a car with a small petrol tank, and it’s slowly shrinking after each fill-up. That’s how EV users must feel, if they know how their batteries behave. A new study analyses the processes.
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When lithium ions are forced rapidly through a battery, they might get stuck and turn into lithium metal, no longer able to move through the battery, says TechXplore.

Imagine being able to refuel your electric car while stopping for a quick snack or refill your phone while brushing your teeth.

“Fast charging is kind of the Holy Grail. It is what everyone who owns a lithium ion battery based device wants to be able to do,” says Senior Engineer David Wragg from Centre for Materials Science and Nanotechnology at the University of Oslo.

Inside the battery, however, there is a lot of complicated chemistry that can be sensitive to how fast it is charged. Things can go wrong.

An energy crisis is gripping the world, with potentially grave consequences – WashPo

Some world leaders just can’t get it into their heads that the wind doesn’t blow on demand, and the sun by definition is daytime only and subject to cloud cover. This has all been said frequently enough, but never seems to hit home in terms of credible energy policies. Ignoring the obvious, they insist that removing reliable power generation is the only way to go, in pursuit of their absurd ‘net zero’ climate targets. An energy crisis in early October doesn’t bode well for the approaching northern hemisphere winter.
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Energy is so hard to come by right now that some provinces in China are rationing electricity, Europeans are paying sky-high prices for liquefied natural gas, power plants in India are on the verge of running out of coal, and the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States stood at $3.25 on Friday — up from $1.72 in April, says the Washington Post (via MSN).

As the global economy recovers and global leaders prepare to gather for a landmark conference on climate change, the sudden energy crunch hitting the world is threatening already stressed supply chains, stirring geopolitical tensions and raising questions about whether the world is ready for the green energy revolution when it’s having trouble powering itself right now.

The economic recovery from the pandemic recession lies behind the crisis, coming after a year of retrenchment in coal, oil and gas extraction.

Climate change tipping points may be too simple a concept, say researchers

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Many of Earth’s complex systems ‘may be more resilient than currently thought’, in the words of the study. Makes a change from claims that various climate nasties lurk just round the corner if this or that is allowed to happen.
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We regularly hear warnings that climate change may lead to ‘tipping points’: irreversible situations where savanna can quickly change into desert, or the warm gulf stream current can simply stop flowing, says Phys.org.

These cautions often refer to spatial patterns as early-warning signals of tipping points. An international team of ecologists and mathematicians has studied these patterns and come to a surprising conclusion.

“Yes, we need to do everything we can to stop climate change,” the authors said in full agreement with the recent IPCC report. “But the Earth is much more resilient than previously thought. The concept of tipping points is too simple.”

The scientists have recently published their work in the journal Science.

The article builds on years of collaboration between a variety of research institutes in the Netherlands and abroad, especially between Utrecht University and Leiden University.

The researchers approached the idea of a tipping point within a spatial context. “The formation of spatial patterns in ecosystems, like the spontaneous formation of complex vegetation patterns, is often explained as an early-warning signal for a critical transition,” explains lead author Max Rietkerk, ecologist affiliated with Utrecht University.

“But these patterns actually appear to allow ecosystems to evade such tipping points.”

These findings are based on mathematical analyses of spatial models and new observations from real-world ecosystems.

Continued here.
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Study: Evasion of tipping in complex systems through spatial pattern formation

E10 Farce As Switch To Greener Fuel ‘major Factor’ Behind Petrol Crisis

Yes, that is the BBC reporter’s name

Sounds credible, despite Government assertions to the contrary. Another example of unintended consequences of interfering in the markets, in the obsessive and fruitless pursuit of so-called climate targets?
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According to the Telegraph, retailers say the Government’s switch to greener fuel played a significant role in September’s petrol crisis (via WorldNewsEra).

The chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association, Brian Madderson, said fuel shortages came as an “unintended consequence” of the Government’s decision to switch to E10 petrol.

“For weeks, we had been emptying our tanks of E5, the old fuel, as fast as we could to get ready for E10,” he said.

“We had all run our petrol stocks down. So, when the panic buying started, many of our members ran out pretty quickly.

Greenpeace loses North Sea Vorlich field legal challenge

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

Shouting ‘climate’ in court doesn’t guarantee legal victories. Appeal to the Supreme Court pending.
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Environmental group Greenpeace has lost its case against the UK government over a North Sea oil field permit, reports BBC News.

Permission to drill the Vorlich site off Aberdeen was given to BP in 2018.

Greenpeace argued in Scotland’s highest civil court there had been “a myriad of failures in the public consultation” and the permit did not consider the climate impacts of burning fossil fuel.

The Court of Session ruling means operations will continue at the field. Greenpeace plans to appeal.

The UK government welcomed the outcome.

Spain’s rare earths pit greens against tech security—and profit

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

Messing up the local environment for whatever reason is always best done somewhere else. As government-mandated pursuit of renewable [sic] technologies ramps up, ever more industrial dirt-digging aka mining to meet demand is obviously inevitable. 
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Spain’s untapped rare earths are stoking tensions between mining companies and environmentalists and farmers who fear the devastating impact from extracting the minerals considered as essential for a high-tech and low-carbon economy, says Phys.org.

The group of 17 minerals are—despite their name—widely distributed across the globe, but exist in such thin concentrations that extracting even small quantities requires the processing of enormous quantities of ore.

Still, they are key ingredients in a range of high-tech and cutting-edge products, from wind turbines and electric vehicles to smart phones, medical devices and missile-guidance systems.