On yer bike, commuters! Electric car obsession impedes race to net zero

E-bikes

Electric bike, aka ‘active travel’, that is. That’s the proposed option for those who don’t want to walk, don’t have access to an electric car, or do but hit recharge problems, in the wondrous(?) net zero future. The real obsession is that with minor trace gases in the atmosphere, leading to all sorts of improbable and foolish policy ideas and decisions.
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Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK, says TechXplore.

Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars sold were electric, it would still take 15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.

The emission savings from replacing all those internal combustion engines with zero-carbon alternatives will not feed in fast enough to make the necessary difference in the time we can spare: the next five years [Talkshop comment – says who?].

Tackling the climate and air pollution requires curbing all motorized transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible.

The sun’s clock: New calculations support and expand planetary hypothesis

The Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory has been looking at some of the Talkshop-featured PRP papers, in particular those by Ian Wilson and Jan-Erik Solheim, plus others by names familiar to many Talkshoppers (Sharp, McCracken, Abreu, Scafetta, McIntosh etc.). It likes what it finds, describing Ian Wilson’s 2013 PRP paper, from which they cite his 11.07 and 193-year solar-planetary periods, as ‘highly instructive and recommendable’ (available via the PRP link above, or the one at the top of the Talkshop home page, or here). This is all something of a contrast to the original publishers, who washed their hands of all the PRP papers under pressure from the IPCC and/or its influential supporters. We may not agree entirely with all their interpretations of the data, but their approach is refreshing. 
H/T Lori
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Solar physicists around the world have long been searching for satisfactory explanations for the sun’s many cyclical, overlapping activity fluctuations, says Phys.org.

In addition to the most famous, approximately 11-year “Schwabe cycle”, the sun also exhibits longer fluctuations, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years.

It follows, for example, the “Gleissberg cycle” (about 85 years), the “Suess-de Vries cycle” (about 200 years) and the quasi-cycle of “Bond events” (about 1500 years), each named after their discoverers.

It is undisputed that the solar magnetic field controls these activity fluctuations.

Ocean circulation is key to understanding uncertainties in climate change predictions

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]

Widely differing climate models are supposed to be a reliable guide to the future? Clearly not. Here the uncertainty gets investigated, and pinned on a phenomenon that was recently claimed by Mann et al not to exist. Of course all these models make the assumption that carbon dioxide at a tiny 0.04% of the atmosphere is a key variable of concern, despite all the other variability in the climate system that they have to wrestle with.
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Thirty state-of-the-art IPCC-climate models predict dramatically different climates for the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe, says Phys.org.

An analysis of the range of responses now reveals that the differences are mostly down to the individual model’s simulations of changes to the North Atlantic ocean currents and not only—as normally assumed—atmospheric changes.

The work, by Katinka Bellomo, National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and colleagues is published today in Nature Communications and is part of the European science collaboration, TiPES, coordinated by the University of Copenhagen.

All climate models vary in the details. Variables such as atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, temperature gradients, sea surface temperatures, and many more are tuned to interact slightly differently for every model. This means that the predictions of the many models also vary.

Solar wind temperature mystery

During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s corona and prominences are visible to the naked eye [image credit: Luc Viatour / https://Lucnix.be ]

Expecting a variable, researchers found a constant.
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From traversing sand dunes in the Sahara Desert to keeping watch for polar bears in the Arctic, a group of solar scientists known as the “Solar Wind Sherpas” led by Shadia Habbal, have traveled to the ends of the Earth to scientifically observe total solar eclipses—the fleeting moments when the Moon completely blocks the Sun, temporarily turning day into night.

With the images, they’ve uncovered a surprising finding about the Sun’s wind and its wispy outer atmosphere—the corona—which is only visible in its entirety during an eclipse, says NASA (via Phys.org).

From more than a decade’s worth of total eclipse observations taken around the world, the team noticed that the corona maintains a fairly constant temperature, despite dynamical changes to the region that occur on an 11-year rotation known as the solar cycle.

Similarly, the solar wind—the steady stream of particles the Sun releases from the corona out across the solar system—matches that same temperature.

Britain faces power cuts as electricity begins to run everything from cars to boilers, say ‘climate change advisers’

[credit: green lantern electric]

‘What a surprise’, said no-one. Cue vague waffle about facing the issues, mainly caused by ditching reliable (compared to renewables) on-demand electricity generation from coal and gas.
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Britain faces catastrophic power cuts because of an increasing reliance on electricity to run everything from cars to home boilers, the Committee on Climate Change has warned. The Telegraph reporting.

Decarbonisation plans, which involve switching transport and heating away from petrol and gas, will mean outages in the future have a greater impact, the Government’s independent advisory committee on climate change has said, as it urged the Government to make sure the system could withstand extreme weather.

Dutch court gets climate science wrong

Credit: planetsave.com

Embarrassing. Whatever the true science may be, it’s not what the court claimed. Is an appeal against their verdict in order?
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A recent Dutch Court decision is getting international attention because it commands climate action.

The case itself is like angels on a pinhead, so of little interest, says David Wojick @ CFACT.

Shell Oil proposed to cut CO2 emissions by 40% and the Court made it 45%, both targets being stupid. The real concern is the precedent of Courts making climate policy, so this decision is worth looking at.

Turns out the Court’s version of the science is amazingly bad.

Climate referendum: Swiss reject higher carbon taxes

Credit: myswitzerland.com

Democratic accountability can be a menace to climate obsessives. Suppressing and ignoring widespread disagreeable — to them — views is more their style. Looking at you, G7 leaders.
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Swiss voters have rejected legislation at the heart of the country’s strategy to abide by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, reports Swiss Info (via The GWPF).

The CO2 law was turned down on Sunday by 51.6% of voters. The negative outcome represents a major upset in the tiny nation that is disproportionately affected by climate change [Talkshop comment – says who?].

Switzerland’s temperatures are rising at about twice the pace of the global average [Talkshop comment – says who?] and its Alpine glaciers risk disappearing by the end of the century [Talkshop comment – empty waffle].

Can the world stop investing in oil & gas?

By the Ageing Tiger

The International Energy Agency was set up in 1974 to ensure the security of oil supplies, if you are old enough, like me, you might remember the Arab oil embargo, queues at petrol stations and rocketing oil prices. So, if the IEA come out and say “that no new oil and natural gas fields are needed in the net zero pathway”, then that must be true and all of us oil and gas professionals can hang up our boots and head to the scrapheap.

When the IEA was formed, it was in response to the emergence of OPEC. When OPEC flexed its muscles in the early 1970’s the cartel supplied over 50% of the world’s oil, they had massive market power.

By the time I was moving to Aberdeen to work offshore on Forties, you see for a brief period I was a genuine North Sea Tiger, OPEC supplied less than 30% of the world’s oil. Oil prices which had been over $100/bbl in 2021 money, duly collapsed and it wasn’t until US shale oil started to chip away at OPEC’s market share that anyone really paid attention to OPEC again.

Deep ‘decarbonization’ by 2050 currently not plausible, study finds

Some climate theories aren’t plausible either, including the one that thinks that atmospheric goings-on are more important than ocean dynamics like El Niño and La Niña. But the fear show must go on.
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Today the Hamburg-based Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS) publishes a new, essential study on climate futures, reports Phys.org.

The study represents the first systematic attempt to investigate whether a climate future with net-zero carbon emissions is not only possible but also plausible.

The authors examine plausibility from a technical-economic perspective, but also with regard to the societal changes necessary for such a future.

They conclude that deep decarbonization by 2050 is currently not plausible—the current efforts to bring about societal transformation need to be far more ambitious.

The Termination Event

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Testable science ideas here. What’s not to like?

“What can I say?” laughs McIntosh. “We’re heretics!”

H/T g2

Spaceweather.com

June 10, 2021: Something big may be about to happen on the sun. “We call it the Termination Event,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “and it’s very, very close to happening.”

If you’ve never heard of the Termination Event, you’re not alone.  Many researchers have never heard of it either. It’s a relatively new idea in solar physics championed by McIntosh and colleague Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland – Baltimore County. According to the two scientists, vast bands of magnetism are drifting across the surface of the sun. When oppositely-charged bands collide at the equator, they annihilate (or “terminate”). There’s no explosion; this is magnetism, not anti-matter. Nevertheless, the Termination Event is a big deal. It can kickstart the next solar cycle into a higher gear.

Above: Oppositely charged magnetic bands (red and blue) march toward the sun’s equator…

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Boris Johnson flies to green G7 summit in private jet

Enough said.
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The decision to take a 250-mile flight instead of more sustainable forms of transport has drawn widespread criticism on social media platforms, reports Energy Live News.

University of East Anglia ‘Climategate’ scandal to be turned into film

Here’s the BBC to tell us it wasn’t a scandal after all, as the scientists who admitted behaving badly by ignoring Freedom of Information requests, and other suspect practices, were really just innocent victims of ‘cyber terrorism’ and malevolent climate sceptics. What a surprise – not.
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The Crown’s Jason Watkins will star as a professor who found himself at the centre of a media storm, says BBC News.

Hackers stole thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Norwich in 2009.

Line of Duty actor Jason Watkins is to star in The Trick playing climate change scientist Prof Philip Jones.

Watkins said it was a “privilege to play the brilliant scientist… whose own world was so threatened”.

Heat pumps may cause dangerous water pollution, report warns

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]

Forcing householders to replace gas boilers that release the harmless and vital trace gas CO2 with expensive heat pumps, to conform to curious and unproven climate-related ideas, may be an even worse plan than originally thought.
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Heat pumps are widely regarded as a silver bullet to the problem of decarbonising heating systems, but a new report from the German government suggests the refrigerants used in many units may have serious environmental impacts, particularly on water, says Renew Economy.

The findings do not spell doom for the heat pump revolution many climate activists want to see, but they would require a significant overhaul in the way many air conditioner and heat pump manufacturers build their systems.

The report, the result of a two year study by the German Environment Agency, concerns the use of halogenated refrigerants – known in the English speaking world as hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) – in air conditioners and heat pumps.

It concludes that their use is already adding significant amounts trifluoroacetate acid (TFA) to the atmosphere, contaminating rain and water supplies, and potentially causing health problems such as liver and kidney damage.

International Energy Agency’s Green Energy Fantasy Is A Hoot

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A hoot, yes – but so far the laughs are on us if we’re in a country pushing the far-fetched nonsense of fearsome human-caused warming.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

Looking for laughs? The International Energy Agency has produced a laugh filled report, grandly titled: “Net Zero by 2050: A roadmap for the global energy system“. Redesigning the global energy system. My, oh my. Below are a few highlights, out of many.

To begin with it is not a roadmap, as it does not tell us how to get there. In fact you cannot get there from here, which makes their there very amusing. This is perhaps the most elaborate net zero fantasy concocted so far.

IEA Executive Director Faith Birol explains where the fantasy comes from: “…combining for the first time the complex models of our two flagship series, the World Energy Outlook and Energy Technology Perspectives.”

So two, not just one, complex computer models, that have never before been combined. I feel better already. Instead of the world energy outlook, it is IEA’s…

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Aquatic fungus creates a fast track for carbon dioxide, say researchers

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

Proving once again how massively important carbon dioxide is to nature, via photosynthesis.
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Tiny algae in Earth’s oceans and lakes take in sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn them into sugars that sustain the rest of the aquatic food web, gobbling up about as much carbon as all the world’s trees and plants combined, says Phys.org.

New research shows a crucial piece has been missing from the conventional explanation for what happens between this first “fixing” of CO2 into phytoplankton and its eventual release to the atmosphere or descent to depths where it no longer contributes to global warming. [Talkshop comment – evidence-free assertion.]

The missing piece? Fungus.

Noctilucent Cloud Season is Getting Longer

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The obvious question being – why?

Spaceweather.com

June 3, 2021: No it’s not your imagination. Noctilucent cloud (NLC) season really is getting longer. New data from NASA’s AIM spacecraft show the first NLCs of summer have been trending earlier since the spacecraft was launched in 2007. This plot prepared by Cora Randall of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics shows the change:

Each little blue box shows the day of year when AIM’s CIPS sensor detected the first NLC of northern summer. “The season appears to be starting earlier, which is making it longer by about 5 days,” says Randall.

Interestingly, the season is not also ending later; it still stops in August. Nevertheless, the early start is giving sky watchers an extra 5 days a year of noctilucent clouds.

The first NLCs of the season typically appear inside the Arctic Circle. Then, they spin outward to lower latitudes–a process which is…

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Firms bidding for major UK public sector contracts must sign net zero pledge

CO2 is not pollution

Yet another absurdity dreamed up from the foolish demonisation of a harmless trace gas essential to nature’s survival.
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Businesses bidding for major UK Government contracts will have to pledge to work towards a net zero carbon output by 2050 in order to be considered, in what is being touted as a world-first move, reports the Evening Standard.

The Cabinet Office said firms will have to publish “clear and credible carbon reduction” plans before seeking to become public sector contractors.

Officials said the measures, announced to coincide with World Environment Day on Saturday and coming before the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in November, makes the UK Government the first in the world to put such a requirement in place.

Are wind farms slowing each other down?

German Chancellor Merkel surveys an offshore wind site [image credit: evwind.es]

Wind ‘farms’ are allergic to each other it seems, sometimes leading to sizable drops in output. Awkward when space isn’t unlimited, some of the best sites are already taken, and the plan is to multiply the existing fleets. Weather dependency is even greater than expected.
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The expansion of wind energy in the German Bight and the Baltic Sea has accelerated enormously in recent years, TechXplore.

The first systems went into operation in 2008. Today, wind turbines with an output of around 8,000 megawatts operate in German waters, which corresponds to around eight nuclear power plants.

But space is limited. For this reason, wind farms are sometimes built very close to one another.

A team led by Dr. Naveed Akhtar from Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon has found that wind speeds at the downstream windfarm are significantly slowed down.

NYTimes and Nature falsely claim one-third of heatwaves due to climate change

Credit: airbus.com

As this article says: ‘The wealth of scientific evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that cold, not heat, kills.’ But anything alarmist, however tenuous, seems to get a free pass from so-called ‘fact checkers’ who want humans to be blamed for any real or imagined climate variation.
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Recently, there have been a number of media stories claiming modest global warming has caused more than a third of heat-related death around the world between 1991 and 2018, says H. Sterling Burnett @ Climate Change Dispatch.

These stories all reference a single study published in Nature Climate Change to support their claims. This study is purely speculative, based on climate model projections and epidemiological studies that don’t control for significant confounding factors.

By contrast, numerous studies show, a modestly warmer world should result in fewer temperature-related deaths overall, not more.

Energy storage: a major ‘clean energy hurdle’

Credit: impactlab.net

Like ‘free beer tomorrow’, projects such as this one may sound good to some, but does the promised tomorrow ever arrive? So far, no. Not even close. And equating so-called ‘clean tech’ with the climate is yet another obviously absurd media fantasy. Solving the issue by 2030 is the target — good luck with that. Of course gas, coal and oil are their own energy storage, but don’t mention those any more.
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A major project aims to overcome a barrier to electricity grids wholly supplied by renewable energy, says BBC News.

Output from wind turbines varies because wind speeds fluctuate; output from solar cells changes according to cloud cover and other factors [Talkshop comment – such as 50% darkness per year].

This is called variability, and overcoming it is crucial for increasing the share of renewables on the grid.