Approval for £175m Cumbria coal mine

An artist’s impression of Woodhouse Colliery (Credit: West Cumbria Mining)

The ‘new-found energy realism of Cumbrian councillors’ has been praised by the GWPF and others, but has predictably dismayed hardline climate miserablists..

Cumbria County Council has backed plans for a £175m metallurgical coal mine on a brownfield site near Whitehaven with work set to get under way by the end of the year, reports Place North West.

The plans by West Cumbria Mining cover mineral extraction over 50 years over a 689-acre site running to and beyond the St Bees coast, along with associated development such as the refurbishment of two existing drifts leading to two new underground drifts; coal storage and processing buildings; office and change building, an access road, ventilation, power and water infrastructure and landscaping.

Geologists may have traced the source of last year’s unexplained massive Earth shake

Location of Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Southeast Africa

Epic. Why are ‘schools of dead fish appearing in the water?’

Last November, a huge seismic event that shook the planet left experts wondering about its possible source, says ScienceAlert.

Researchers now think they know what might have caused it: an offshore volcanic event unlike any other in recorded history.

If the hypothesis is right, and there has been a massive movement of magma underneath the sea floor, that has implications for nearby Mayotte and the neighbouring Comoros islands off the coast of Africa.

Henrik Svensmark: FORCE MAJEURE The Sun’s Role in Climate Change

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The author writes in his 40-page document: ‘This report is not meant to be an exhaustive representation of all the published papers related to a solar influence on Earth’s climate, but aims to give a clear presentation of the current knowledge on the link between solar activity and climate.’

Where does cosmic ray variation fit into the ‘big picture’ of solar influences on the Earth?

The Next Grand Minimum

I am still studying this paper but wanted to share and get your feedback

Executive Summary

Over the last twenty years there has been good progress in understanding the solar influ- ence on climate. In particular, many scientific studies have shown that changes in solar activ- ity have impacted climate over the whole Holocene period (approximately the last 10,000 years). A well-known example is the existence of high solar activity during the Medieval Warm Period, around the year 1000 AD, and the subsequent low levels of solar activity during the cold period, now called The Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD). An important scientific task has been to quantify the solar impact on climate, and it has been found that over the eleven- year solar cycle the energy that enters the Earth’s system is of the order of 1.0–1.5 W/m2. This is nearly an order of magnitude larger than what would be…

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Spiraling giants: Witnessing the birth of a massive binary star system

Pairs or multiple systems of stars which orbit their common center of mass. If we can measure and understand their orbital motion, we can estimate the stellar masses.

How does this work? The two massive stars in question are orbiting each other at a distance of 180 AU (astronomical units), six times greater than that of Neptune to the Sun. Each orbit may take nearly 600 years.

Scientists from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research in Japan, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the University of Virginia in the USA and collaborators have made observations of a molecular cloud that is collapsing to form two massive protostars that will eventually become a binary star system, reports Phys.org.

While it is known that most massive stars possess orbiting stellar companions it has been unclear how this comes about—for example, are the stars born together from a common spiraling gas disk at the center of a collapsing cloud, or do they pair up later by chance encounters in a crowded star cluster.

Researchers create hydrogen fuel from seawater

Desalination in California

As usual with these types of experiment, nothing can be assumed unless or until the tests of economic and industrial viability have been passed. They say the electrode ‘is able to go more than a thousand hours’ but that’s still only a few weeks. Storage and management of hydrogen is known to be tricky and expensive compared to most other fuels.

Stanford researchers have devised a way to generate hydrogen fuel using solar power, electrodes and saltwater from San Francisco Bay, reports Phys.org.

The findings, published March 18 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate a new way of separating hydrogen and oxygen gas from seawater via electricity.

Existing water-splitting methods rely on highly purified water, which is a precious resource and costly to produce.

#Parody Canada’s Climate Refugee Plan

Tired of being harangued by insistent climate doomsters with their wildly over-hyped scaremongering and dubious ‘science’? Read on for some well-earned light relief.

Gavin Schmidt tweeted that he liked a #ClimateStrike poster that read “Soon even moving to Canada isn’t going to solve our problems.” 

That reminded us that we had a parody submission on the Canadian government’s tiered climate refugee program, that would at least be worth a laugh, if not serious consideration for some!!

See what you think, say Friends of Science Calgary.

Solar tsunami can trigger the sunspot cycle

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

Something else for solar theorists to ponder. The researchers say: ‘We have demonstrated here a physical mechanism, the solar tsunami, which gives birth to the new cycle’s sunspots precisely within a few weeks from the cessation of old cycle’s spots.’

According to the model, the next sunspot cycle can be expected to begin in 2020, says The Hindu.

It is believed that the “solar dynamo” — a naturally occurring generator which produces electric and magnetic fields in the sun — is linked to the production of sunspots.

What kick-starts the 11-year sunspot cycle is not known. Now, a group of solar physicists suggests that a “solar tsunami” is at work that triggers the new sunspot cycle, after the old one ends.

Climate Crisis? Four Major Metrics That Say Otherwise

Credit: planetsave.com

Joe Bastardi argues that loud claims of a climate about to spin out of control are out of tune with various actual observations.

I have long advocated that climatologists take a course on long-range forecasting so they can better understand the inherent errors in trying to predict the weather or climate, says Joe Bastardi at Patriot Post.

In the debate over the fate of the planet, where one side is always pushing hysteria, the weather is plainly not cooperating with the missive.

Forecasters take climatology classes and are now being taught the one-sided climate narrative, but in general, climatologists do not have to learn how to forecast.

Polar vortex helping forecasters predict New Zealand weather

What is the dominant climate for Oceania, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica?

They refer to the ‘no-show El Niño event’ but allow that a weak version could still show up at some point this year, in theory at least.

Move over El Niño, and make room for SAM, says NZ’s Stuff website.

While attention over the summer focused on the much-promised but yet to arrive El Niño, SAM – or the Southern Annular Mode, to give it its proper name – has been working away quietly in the background determining our weather.

Forecasters are becoming increasingly enamoured with SAM for the valuable guidance it gives of likely weather conditions up to two weeks ahead.

What are the opponents of Donald Trump’s climate review committee afraid of?

Credit: nationalreview.com

Dr Roy Spencer tries to strike a note of sanity amidst the latest bout of doom-laden climate hysteria doing the rounds via cynical manipulation of the minds of school kids. What is accelerating is the bluster of alarmists, who lack credible empirical evidence of ‘human-caused’ as opposed to natural climate variation.

On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims.

Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled”, writes Roy Spencer in The Washington Times.

But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?

James Bond going electric in next film with Aston Martin Rapide E

Not the 2019 model [image credit: camaro5.com]

A short post from our Hollywood reporter, or something – amidst reports of ‘007 going green’ (is he ill?) and ‘Dr No…petrol’ – and we’re not making any of this up. You’d need to be on a big budget to afford his ride though – the price is shocking.

Silent EV in Her Majesty’s secret service will have all the gadgets, reports Autoblog.

England’s The Sun newspaper, in a piece fabulously titled “The Spy Who Plugged Me … In,” reports that James Bond will drive an Aston Martin Rapide E in the next franchise installment.

Quoting “an insider,” it’s said director Cary Joji Fukunaga is a “total tree-hugger” and pushed to include a more environmentally friendly set of wheels.

Tectonics in the tropics trigger Earth’s ice ages, says study

Glacier in Patagonia

The latest Ice Ages theory rolls off the production line. This one relies on ‘pulling enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere’, so we can see how they’re thinking. A possible problem there is that historical data from ice cores usually show carbon dioxide changes following temperature changes by a few hundred years, which seems to contradict the findings here. It’s the old chicken and egg conundrum – effects can’t precede causes. An important part of the carbon cycle is ocean outgassing of CO2 (response to warming) and absorption (response to cooling).

Over the last 540 million years, the Earth has weathered three major ice ages—periods during which global temperatures plummeted, producing extensive ice sheets and glaciers that have stretched beyond the polar caps.

Now scientists at MIT, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California at Berkeley have identified the likely trigger for these ice ages, reports Phys.org.

Sea level views from SEPP (190309) too superficial to be useful, say experts

This is a critique by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner and two colleagues of a recent article discussing problems with IPCC sea level claims.

The original article by Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) starts:

Rising Seas – At Sea, or Shore? The latest Summary for Policymakers of its full Assessment Report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC, AR-5, SPM, 2014) declared that sea level rise is accelerating.

Numerous studies have come out in support of that view. As shown in the 2008 report of the Nongovernment International Panel for Climate Change (NIPCC, 2008), with the ending of the last Ice Age about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, sea levels have risen about 400 feet (120 meters).

At first, the rise was slow, then rapid, then for the past several thousand years slowing to about 7 to 8 inches (18 to 20 cm) per century. There is some question about the variation during the Little Ice Age and the period following it called the industrial period since 1850.

Dust ring discovered in Mercury’s orbit

Image credit: Wikipedia

The next step is to find the source(s) of the dust, with as yet undetected asteroids thought to be the leading suspects.

Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system, says Fox News.

Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus’ neighborhood, another new paper concludes.

Web of Distrust

H/T to follower ‘@realhxn’ for flagging up this issue. There is a plugin to chrome which warns people not to trust the talkshop.

The plugin owners say this is because

Important to know that if you are using sub-domain of wordpress.com that in the past used for fraud and phishing – 
Our community has rated this all sub-domains as not trusted. 

They go on to say

New geologic evidence supports theory of major cosmic impact event about 12,800 years ago

Impact [image credit: karbalion.com]

This time, unusually, the new Younger Dryas evidence is from way below the equator, which they believe shows that ‘the Younger Dryas climatic onset was an extreme global event’.

When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be, says Phys.org.

“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work,” Kennett noted. “The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems.”

He’s talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning).

The Climate Debate Twenty Years Later

H/T The GWPF
Still going round in circles it seems: long on assertions but short on credible evidence of the claimed alarming human effects.

“Better climate knowledge about natural versus anthropogenic forcing seems to be a decade away”, quotes Master Resource.

That was the major takeaway from a major 1999 climate conference in Houston, Texas , as noted by Martin Cassidy of the Houston Geological Society, who authored a conference summary, “Global Climate Change: Panel Agrees: ‘In 10 Years We Will Know’.”

Fracking could cut Britain’s gas imports to zero by early 2030s

Credit: mygridgb.co.uk

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The numbers can be debated, but the point that there is an economic opportunity in front of the UK is clear. Take it or ignore it?

LONDON (Reuters) – Fracking Britain’s shale gas reserves could cut the country’s imports of gas to zero by the early 2030s, an industry group said on Monday.

Britain currently imports more than half of its gas via pipelines from continental Europe and Norway and through shipments of liquefied natural gas from countries such as Russia, the United States and Qatar.

Australian climate tool identifies end of winter by 2050

Sydney, Australia

Climate models can’t be wrong or unreliable – can they? Except they generally are.

Academics from the School of Art & Design have teamed up with colleagues from the ANU Climate Change Institute on a design project, which takes existing data and communicates the impacts of climate change in a way that people can engage with and better understand, says Phys.org.

The resulting new climate tool visualises data which shows by 2050, Australians will no longer enjoy winter as they know it today and will experience a new season the designers are calling “New Summer”.

Leading climate researcher calls for ban on domestic flights in Germany to save emissions

Image credit: emeraldmedia.co.uk

How about a ban on endless international climate conferences that lead to hundreds of flights – including many long-haul – but produce little of value, ‘to save emissions’? In fact the ’20 flights in a lifetime’ proposed here would probably have that effect anyway. The report ends with an apparent claim that particulates in the air are a ‘climate problem’.

Leading German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber has called for a substantial shift in strategy for the tourism industry to make sure that its carbon footprint does not contribute to the sector’s possible demise.

“Tourism bites the hand that feeds it if it contributes to climate change,” the former director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said at the ITB international tourism fair in Berlin.

If beaches around the world are flooded due to a global rise in temperature of 4 or 5 degrees Celsius, “there will be no more beach tourism,” Schellnhuber said.