The Climate Blame Game

A diet of daily assertions that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions are a big deal, isn’t evidence of anything.
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A paper published today shows that attempts to blame extreme weather on human-caused global warming are “overconfident and probably wrong”, says The Global Warming Policy Forum.

The paper, by statistician and philosopher of science Dr William M Briggs, reveals that mainstream attribution science is beset by flaws of reasoning, modelling and data.

The Green Mirage

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Wind is generating a mere 1-2% of UK electricity today, the cause being a high pressure weather system with very low wind speeds, which no amount of subsidy can ever prevent. Discuss.

Science Matters

John Constable writes at Civitas The Green Mirage: Why a Low-Carbon Economy May be Further Off Than We Think. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images. h/t Real Clear Public Affairs

Findings:

• The prospects for a sustainable, low-carbon economy as the result of current UK national and EU-wide policies are poor.
• Empirical experience in Spain and Germany shows that the costs of supporting renewable energy generation are too high.
• Rising employment in the renewable energy sector compared to the wider UK economy stems from unsustainably high subsidies.
• Renewables are naturally less productive, so as they are relentlessly pursued, a painful rebalancing of the economy will occur, with fewer jobs and less economic growth.

Bottom Line: The current prospects for a sustainable low-carbon economy are poor in both the UK and across the European Union (EU). Germany and Spain have already clearly shown what happens when state coercion forces…

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Tremors around geothermal plant in France put spotlight on safety

Image credit: Jérôme Dorkel – Eurométropole de Strasbourg

Home owner insurance claims are pouring in. The local ‘net zero’ emissions plan is in serious trouble.
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A series of minor human-induced earthquakes in the area of Strasbourg, eastern France, last December has reminded local inhabitants about the safety of geothermal energy, highlighting the challenges faced by deep drilling technology, says Euractiv.

In December, the area around Strasbourg was shaken by several induced tremors, including one of 3.5 magnitude, after a geothermal company carrying out tests injected high-pressure water into the ground earlier in the autumn.

Induced earthquakes – those caused by human activity – had begun since tests started in the Alsace region in October at the geothermal plant operated by Fonroche, a French energy company.

The tremors were directly linked to the starting-up activities of the plant, said the French association of geothermal professionals, the AFPG.

China’s plans for Himalayan super dam stoke fears in India

Three Gorges Dam [image credit: caixinglobal.com]

Nothing if not ambitious. Needless to say it will need a lot of concrete, which will no doubt dismay climate botherers.
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China is planning a mega dam in Tibet able to produce triple the electricity generated by the Three Gorges—the world’s largest power station—stoking fears among environmentalists and in neighbouring India, reports Phys.org.

The structure will span the Brahmaputra River before the waterway leaves the Himalayas and flows into India, straddling the world’s longest and deepest canyon at an altitude of more than 1,500 metres (4,900 feet).

The project in Tibet’s Medog County is expected to dwarf the record-breaking Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in central China, and is billed as able to produce 300 billion kilowatts of electricity each year.

It is mentioned in China’s strategic 14th Five-Year Plan, unveiled in March at an annual rubber-stamp congress of the country’s top lawmakers.

Rick Salvador: Final LOD model performance update

Talkshop readers will remember that as well as his work on modelling solar activity, Rick Salvador also built a planetary model to predict variation in Earth’s Length of Day (LOD). The model uses 13 frequencies derives from planetary and lunar motion to replicate changes in Earth’s spin rate.

Rick has retired from modelling now, so this is the final update on the model’s performance. The IERS LOD database was changed in early 2020, so the model performance update ends there. Over the last 4 years, Rick found that to keep it on track, he needed to add a -0.0006 second correction in June each year. The necessity for this is as yet unexplained and comments on possible reasons are encouraged.

Microwave boiler launches as retrofittable alternative to heat pumps and gas

Domestic gas central heating boiler

The battle to sell replacements for gas boilers, likely to be unavailable new in the relatively near future (2030?) in the UK, is on. As this microwave option appears we ask what, if anything, is wrong with existing electric boilers? Needless to say, anything electric can’t be more ‘low carbon’ than its electricity source, which is usually 40-60% gas in the UK. But using electricity for heating water instead of making hydrogen has some logic to it.
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A new heating technology has emerged from under the radar as a potential alternative to both heat pumps and gas boilers in the quest for low carbon heating, reports H&V News.

Heat Wayv, a UK energy technology company, has unveiled the world’s first microwave boiler intended as a zero-emissions replacement for gas boilers, with a view to the phase-out of natural gas in new-build homes from 2025.

The company originally developed the microwave technology as a portable cooking device for military use and has now applied it to the heating of water.

Current climate model simulations overestimate future sea-level rise

Emperor penguins, Antarctica [image credit: USAF / Wikipedia]

Too much alarm coming from climate models, again. This new research finds ‘some regions near Antarctica even cool under climate change’.
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The melting rate of the Antarctic ice sheet is mainly controlled by the increase of ocean temperatures surrounding Antarctica.

Using a new, higher-resolution climate model simulation, scientists from Utrecht University found a much slower ocean temperature increase compared to current simulations with a coarser resolution, reports Phys.org.

Abrupt ice age climate changes behaved like cascading dominoes

Rinks Glacier, West Greenland [image credit: NSIDC]

Interesting, but as we’ve had a temperature rise of about 1.2ºC since 1880, according to one source at least, comparisons with much bigger historical increases in shorter timescales seem somewhat ambitious, to say the least.
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Throughout the last ice age, the climate changed repeatedly and rapidly during so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, where Greenland temperatures rose between 5 and 16 degrees Celsius in decades, says Phys.org.

When certain parts of the climate system changed, other parts of the climate system followed like a series of dominos toppling in succession.

This is the conclusion from an analysis of ice-core data by a group of researchers that included postdoc Emilie Capron and associate professor Sune Olander Rasmussen from the Section for the Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, in Denmark.

This discovery, just published in the journal Nature Communications, is concerning because the extent of sea ice in the Arctic played an important part in these dramatic climate shifts of the past.

France to declare agricultural ‘disaster’ over spring frost

A winegrower lights anti-frost candles in a French vineyard [image credit: thelocal.fr]

Government policy is to try and make the climate cooler. Now read on.
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The French government is to declare an agricultural disaster over an unusual early spring frost that has damaged crops and vines across the country, the agriculture minister said. Phys.org reporting.

Julien Denormandie told Franceinfo radio late Thursday that the cold snap had been “particularly difficult” for the sector with “significant losses” registered.

“We are completely mobilised so that the accompanying measures can be put in place as quickly as possible,” he said.

The Chance of Storms Just Doubled

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A prediction for the Talkshop to mull over.

Spaceweather.com

April 8, 2021: If you think you are safe from geomagnetic storms, think again. A new study just published in the journal Space Weather finds that powerful storms may be twice as likely as previously thought.

Jeffrey Love of the USGS, who authored the study, analyzed Earth’s strongest geomagnetic storms since the early 1900s. Previous studies looked back only to the 1950s. The extra data led to a surprise:

“A storm as intense as, say, the Québec Blackout of 1989 is predicted to occur, on average, about every four solar cycles. This is twice as often as estimated using only the traditional shorter dataset,” says Love.

Above: The data Love used in his extreme value analysis. Red and blue circles denote the two strongest storms in each solar cycle.

A study like this is part physics, part math, and part detective work.

Love has spent recent years digging deeply into…

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Many Brits underwhelmed by so-called ‘climate crisis’, Sky News poll finds

Credit: planetsave.com

The prospect of a cool country becoming marginally warmer, should that happen, isn’t an urgent problem or maybe even any problem for the average Brit, judging by this poll. Climate fearmongers may need to look elsewhere for a good source of propaganda victims.
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Only 50% of respondents in the YouGov poll for Sky News supported a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030.

Almost 25% of Britons are unwilling to change key habits that would help tackle climate change, an exclusive poll for Sky News suggests.

The survey, conducted by YouGov, asked participants what they would be prepared to do in order to reduce the country’s carbon emissions.

The Daily Climate Show: Track global warming with our live counters, says Sky News

Get your climate change to 9 decimal places with one click. Who are they kidding? Never mind — happy tracking! 😂
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Rising temperatures, CO2 emissions and where our energy is sourced are all tracked here at Sky News.

America Pursues Expensive Electricity While Much Of The World Lives In Energy Poverty

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Climate virtue signallers demand belief in their fool’s paradise, regardless of cost.

PA Pundits - International

By Ronald Stein ~

With many still living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity with offshore wind turbines on the East and West Coasts.

The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) has already documented that offshore wind continues to be one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation.

Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21^st century. Electricity is the one of the simplest solutions to improved health, economic opportunity, education, nutrition, and comfort in the developing world, especially for women and girls.

In the world’s poorest countries, there are 11 million children in the world dying every year.

Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no…

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A sun reflector for Earth? Scientists explore the potential risks and benefits

UK summer 2018 [image credit: BBC]

The Sun is more than capable of regulating itself. Attempts by humans to interfere with its effects are by definition ill-conceived. No trend in Arctic summer sea ice data since the early 2000s, for example, despite so-called experts claiming it was doomed several years ago, so who needs any intervention?
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Nine of the hottest years in human history [Talkshop comment – meaning since 1979, when satellite data became moderately reliable] have occurred in the last decade.

Without a major shift in this climate trajectory, the future of life on Earth is in question, claims Phys.org.

Should humans, whose fossil-fueled society is driving climate change [Talkshop comment – evidence-free assertion], use technology to put the brakes on global warming?

New study ties solar variability to the onset of decadal La Niña events

Solar activity [image credit: NASA]

What drives the weather can drive the climate. In this case the chances of non-correlation are said to be extremely low.

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A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth, Phys.org reports.

If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have a number of seasonal climate effects over land.

For example, the southern United States tends to be warmer and drier during a La Nina, while the northern U.S. tends to be colder and wetter.

“Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper.

As Brits dream of continental holidays, Prince William warns humans must ‘reset trajectory’ to avoid climate disaster

Prince William [image credit: Frankie Fouganthin @ Wikipedia]

We’re in the realms of vague waffle here. Where the climate fits in to anything he says is a mystery, in this report at least. Anyway, who is interested in yet another jet-setting promoter of a so-called ‘great reset’ that boils down to yet more restrictions on lifestyles — for the many, but not the favoured few like him?
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Prince William is calling for humanity to “reset our relationship with nature and our trajectory as a species” in a bid to avoid a climate disaster, reports Sky News.

In a special video message broadcast at the Conservation International Gala in the US, the Duke of Cambridge said the next decade would be “one of our greatest tests”.

Scam Alert: Hydrogen Hoax – The Next Great ‘Renewable’ Energy Fraud

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Prof. Ian Plimer’s warning: “We have the DNA skills now to identify a person from a tiny little piece of meat. And that’s what would be left if you have an accident in a hydrogen-driven vehicle.”

STOP THESE THINGS

Wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency has forced rent seekers to engineer yet another fraud: hydrogen gas – which is to be purportedly produced using wind and solar’s occasional and chaotic output. Where wind and solar have never made any sense, the hydrogen proposition is completely bonkers.

Defying the laws of physics and thermodynamics – just for starters – the economics would make hydrogen gas produced using already heavily subsidised wind and solar the most expensive energy in human history.

And yet, the same class of dimwitted politicians are signing up in feverish earnest, as if they’re about to back a surefire Melbourne Cup winner.

As with wind and solar power, it’s the same too-good-to-be-true pitch directed at the starry-eyed, gullible and naïve. All, of course, in the name of obtaining a stream of taxpayer back subsidies that will outlast religion.

STT, always ready to rain on the renewable energy…

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Companies back moratorium on deep sea mining in ‘sustainability’ row

Deep sea mining illustration [image credit: youtube]

Deep sea mining supporters argue along the lines that the ocean floor is such a big place that scraping a few bits of it won’t matter on a global scale. Is this a row between the haves and have-nots, as limited supplies on land of the required materials are fought over?

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A long-running dispute over plans to start mining the ocean floor has suddenly flared up, reports BBC News.

For years it was only environmental groups that objected to the idea of digging up metals from the deep sea.

But now BMW, Volvo, Google and Samsung are lending their weight to calls for a moratorium on the proposals.

The move has been criticised by companies behind the deep sea mining plans, who say the practice is more sustainable in the ocean than on land.

UK company creates ‘world’s most sustainable electric vehicle motors’

Typical electric car set-up

Reducing both costs and mining waste sounds good, if it can be developed to industrial scale.
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A UK-based company has unveiled its what it believes to be the world’s most sustainable motor for electric vehicles, says ElectricHybridVehicleTechnology.

Its new motors are completely free of rare earth magnets, yet are said to be able to offer all of the performance and efficiency benefits and more of a conventional permanent magnet motor, without their considerable environmental drawbacks.

Unlike today’s standard EV motors, its HDSRM and SSRD motors do not feature rare earth magnets so do not require the harmful mining of materials such as neodymium and dysprosium.

According to independent research, every tonne of rare earth material mined produces up to 1.4 tonnes of radioactive waste, 200m3 of acid-containing sewage water, 60,000m3 waste gas containing hydrochloric acid and 27.6 tonnes of CO2.

Based on a global car production of 97 million vehicles, AEM’s technology could save the production of 133 million tonnes CO2 per year as well as 300,000 tonnes of radioactive waste.

Korea: Carbon neutrality plan lacks plan for carbon neutrality, say experts

South Korean coal plant [image credit: worldcoal.com]

What a shame — but all too familiar. Attempts at climate virtue signalling are easy but trying to spell out, let alone impose, unrealistic ‘solutions’ is not.
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The push for carbon neutrality is one of the biggest policy initiatives under the Moon Jae-in administration, but energy experts say that the plan to make Korea a carbon neutral society by 2050 is both unclear and unrealistic, reports the Korea JoongAng Daily.

The science minister, industry minister and environment minister on Wednesday announced an investment strategy to fund research and development (R&D) efforts for carbon neutrality.

The basic idea of the government’s Wednesday plan is to develop technology that could reduce carbon dioxide emissions to match the amount that is produced at Korea’s industrial sites — not a small task considering that Korea’s economy is still dominated by manufacturing industries.