BBC climate change ‘facts’ are fiction

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

‘Move along please, nothing to see here, science is settled’. Is that the BBC’s climate reporting policy? Does controversy have to be swept under the carpet, for fear of upsetting the ‘greenblob’? What happened to their charter duty of impartiality?

H/T The GWPF

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change, writes Harry Wilkinson.

This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these ones aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

Dust storms on Titan spotted for the first time

Saharan dust storm [image credit: BBC]

The researchers report that ‘Titan displays particularly energetic meteorology at equinox in equatorial regions’. Associated strong winds ‘are expected to occur in downbursts during rare equinoctial methane storms—consistent with the timing of the observed brightenings’. On Earth, auroral activity is strongest at the equinoxes, so solar wind strength could be a factor in both phenomena.

Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed what appear to be giant dust storms in equatorial regions of Saturn’s moon Titan, reports Phys.org.

The discovery, described in a paper published on Sept. 24 in Nature Geoscience, makes Titan the third Solar System body, in addition to Earth and Mars, where dust storms have been observed.

Cambridge University scientists create ancient tree ring diary

Did the BBC just say in this report: ‘if the recent warming is unusual’? Whether tree ring analysis can improve predictions, as suggested, is an interesting question but open to debate.

The “longest, continuous tree ring-based diary” is being created by scientists at the University of Cambridge to help map climate change, reports BBC News.

The diary documents climatic conditions going back centuries, using trees from across the world.

Climate alarmists accuse IPCC of ‘watering down’ disaster predictions (again)

Credit: planetsave.com

Déjà vu – another amusing outbreak of paranoia from the ranks of overheating climate obsessives who think the weather depends on how much fuel is burnt, or something.

Climate alarmists are alarmed that a new IPCC report to be released on 8 October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will reject their apocalyptic rhetoric and disaster predictions, says The GWPF.

They blame IPCC scientists for deliberately downplaying the danger of global warming in order to placate the Trump Administration and some of its fossil fuel allies.

Time To Pull The Plug On Electric Vehicle Handouts For The Rich

.
How long does an introductory incentive period for EVs have to go on for? The hefty subsidies have to come out of finite state budgets.

PA Pundits - International

By Nicolas Loris and David Grogan ~

Earlier this year, Congress passed an irresponsible budget bill that included handouts for electric vehicle owners and alternative fuels.

Eager to frivolously waste more taxpayer dollars, some legislators are now pushing to extend the electric vehicle tax credit and lift the cap on the number of vehicles that qualify for the credit by each manufacturer.

In 2014, 79 percent of electric vehicle tax credits went to households making over $100,000. (Photo: nrqemi/Getty Images)

Doing so would reward special interests and only benefit the wealthiest Americans. Congress should instead eliminate the subsidies for electric vehicles.

Promoted as a way to wean Americans off their alleged addiction to oil, both federal and state governments have generous handouts for electric vehicles. Consumers can use up to $7,500 of other peoples’ money to buy an electric vehicle.

Add in-state and local incentives and that number can easily top…

View original post 668 more words

Cuadrilla to start fracking in England in weeks

UK fracking regulation – a very slow process

It’s been a long time with many obstacles to overcome, but UK fracking seems finally to be close to the start line.

H/T The GWPF

LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Shale gas developer Cuadrilla will start fracking at its Preston New Road site in northwest England in the next few weeks, it said on Wednesday as it announced government approval for a second well.

Hydraulically fracturing, or fracking, involves extracting gas from rocks by breaking them up with water and chemicals at high pressure and was halted in Britain seven years ago after causing earth tremors.

Report slams ‘high flying’ UN environment chief

Another case of ‘do as we say, not as we do’ as UN globe-trotting by fuel-powered machines takes precedence over its claims that there’s a serious problem with man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Not so serious that they can’t ignore it whenever it suits them to do so, which seems to be most of the time judging by this report.

The head of the UN body that leads on sustainability and green issues has been criticised for extensive and expensive air travel, reports BBC News.

A draft internal audit, obtained by the Guardian and seen by the BBC, says that Erik Solheim’s actions risked the reputation of UN Environment.

The report says he incurred costs of $488,518 (£373,557) while travelling for 529 out of 668 days.

There was “no oversight or accountability” to monitor this travel.

End of the road for solar panels on roadways?

Solar panel road [image credit: Wattway]

For several obvious reasons cited below, the conclusion should be that solar panels on road surfaces perform extremely poorly and are essentially an irrelevant waste of money. If the money has to be spent, putting the same amount of panels somewhere more suitable would be an easy improvement to make.
H/T Phys.org

Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels, says Dylan Ryan at The Conversation.

The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.

Astrophysicists measure precise rotation pattern of sun-like stars for the first time

Artist’s impression of an exoplanetary system [credit: NASA]

…and don’t get the answers their models led them to expect. Could the close proximity to their star of most exoplanets so far observed be a factor?

Sun-like stars rotate up to two and a half times faster at the equator than at higher latitudes, a finding by researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi that challenges current science on how stars rotate, reports Phys.org.

Until now, little was known about the precise rotational patterns of Sun-like stars, only that the equator spins faster than at higher latitudes, similar to the Sun.

Hurricane Florence–The Myths and The Facts

.
The blog post title speaks for itself. Alarmists can’t accept natural variation, so use false logic to try and claim that any weather characteristic which wasn’t exactly like the last few hurricanes must be somehow man-made.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://abcnews.go.com/US/million-people-evacuated-coast-hurricane-florence-bears/story?id=57740845

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-storm-florence/mass-evacuations-ordered-as-hurricane-florence-heads-toward-carolinas-idUSKCN1LR0J6

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45517260

http://time.com/5397241/florence-breaks-rainfall-records-in-north-carolina/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-real-welcome-to-the-new-normal/2018/09/17/2ded61e4-bab3-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html?utm_term=.21f11175fc15

True to form, the media have been whipping up a state of hysteria about Hurricane Florence. Unlike some of their more irresponsible members, I have waited until all of the data is in, instead of rushing to judgment.

So, to the facts:

View original post 1,282 more words

Dr. Willie Soon; The “Global Blue Sun” Solar Anomaly during the 1450s and 1460s

.
A rapid-fire lecture on solar-planetary links, sunspots, volcanoes, ice cores, climate and a whole lot more, including a closer look at the Spörer Minimum.

CO2 is Life

Please Like, Share, Subscribe and Comment

View original post

Hurricane Florence: climate dynamics context

.
A sort of post-mortem look at various issues surrounding Hurricane Florence. If pressed for time, ‘the take home point is that convincingly attributing any of this to human caused global warming is very challenging’ – see the summary.

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

“Impending massive hurricanes bring the best out of weather twitter and the worst out of climate twitter” – Joseph Maykut

View original post 2,418 more words

How constant is the “solar constant?”

.
Well…it’s complicated. The available data is less than perfect, but the ‘natural variation option’ (so to speak) is still on the table.

Andy May Petrophysicist

The IPCC lowered their estimate of the impact of solar variability on the Earth’s climate from the already low value of 0.12 W/m² (Watts per square-meter) given in their fourth report (AR4), to a still lower value of 0.05 W/m² in the 2013 fifth report (AR5), the new value is illustrated in Figure 1. These are long term values, estimated for the 261-year period 1750-2011 and they apply to the “baseline” of the Schwabe ~11-year solar (or sunspot) cycle, which we will simply call the “solar cycle” in this post. The baseline of the solar cycle is the issue since the peaks are known to vary. The Sun’s output (total solar irradiance or “TSI”) is known to vary at all time scales (Kopp 2016), the question is by how much. The magnitude of short-term changes, less than 11 years, in solar output are known relatively accurately, to better…

View original post 3,387 more words

Computer climate simulations just crashed

Not the actual simulations, but the already fading credibility thereof. What scientific reason is there to rely on their results?

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Space Science, writes Andrew Montford for The GWPF.

This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

German car giants face EU emissions probe

Note this is not about the original issue of diesel ‘defeat’ devices. Another report at AFP says ‘Daimler and VW are widely reported to be putting themselves forward as whistle-blowers in the case, in order to win leniency with the EU authorities.’ Sounds like a guilty plea.

German carmakers BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen are to face an EU inquiry for allegedly conspiring to restrict diesel emissions treatment systems, BBC News reports.

The European Commission said it was investigating whether they agreed to limit the development of systems to reduce harmful emissions. It said that if proven, this could mean that consumers had been denied the chance to buy less polluting cars.

David Eyles: The Quiet Revolution

A rarely spotted phenomenon, sometimes acknowledged by one or two of the more astute political pundits, is that the Labour Party has moved away from its core of working-class voters. The leadership has now fully embraced the demands of its middle and upper-middle class hierarchy and has gone full-on Quinoa Marxist.

However, the Labour Party is not alone, because the Conservative Party has also moved in the same direction, albeit not quite so far. The leadership indulges in wholesale political correctness. It then signals its virtue by casual obeisance to whichever favoured minority group is flavour of the week. Accordingly, the Tories have also stepped away from their voters – most of whom are utterly bored with this infantile nonsense.

There has been some floundering recognition that the sheer nastiness of the Labour Left is causing some Labour MPs to panic and talk of forming a new centrist party. But that will only occupy the same ground that the Tories already occupy, by virtue of their own leftward manoeuvrings. Talk of a Tony Blair led centre-left party, perhaps embracing the Liberal Democrats, would be a move into an already overcrowded marketplace with decreasing numbers of voters to whom this will appeal. Tony Blair is the most toxic brand in British politics.

Big Green Inc.: Inside the $4 billion U.S. foundations funding Green activists

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

It seems some people in the US with money to burn are queuing up to try and buy the weather they think they want, with fossil fuels their primary target. The concept of natural variation of the climate has either totally escaped them, or they must think it belongs in the past only.
H/T The GWPF

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday, writes Michael Bastasch.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016.

Scientists receive $1.3 million to study new propulsion idea for spacecraft

Image credit: Spaceflight now

Light as a power source is only a theory so far, but could have interesting implications if it can be shown to work. Or it could go nowhere…

Spacecraft and satellites could in future be launched into space without the need for fuel, thanks to a revolutionary new theory, says EurekAlert.

Dr Mike McCulloch, from the University of Plymouth, first put forward the idea of quantised inertia (QI) – through which he believes light can be converted into thrust – in 2007.

He has now received $1.3million from the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a four-year study which aims to make the concept a reality.

California Dreaming: Push for 100% Wind & Solar Doomed to End in Costly Failure

.
Apart from a major question of practicality, where’s the money supposed to come from for these ideologically driven policies?

Some citizens are already resisting…
California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups

STOP THESE THINGS

Renewable energy zealots talk about the ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future being ‘inevitable’. Except that the only thing inevitable about running on sunshine and breezes, is grid chaos and rocketing power prices. Ask a South Australian.

It is also what that crazy German Corporal with the funny moustache called a “big lie”: so helpful to the tyrant because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted and more readily fall victim to a colossal untruth, than the small lie.

The idea that a country can run itself entirely on wind and solar power is, of course, patent nonsense.

But, there are plenty profiting from that ideologically driven fiction, who have worked out that if you ramp up the claims to the height of ridiculousness, there are plenty of idiots ready to believe you.

California has done just that.

California cannot run on…

View original post 866 more words

A laser in space to measure changes in polar ice

Screenshot from NASA video

The reporter here is obviously sold on endless warming of planet Earth, but ignoring the propaganda, there are some technical details of the mission which is due to last three years but could be extended up to ten. NASA says: ‘The ICESat-2 laser will pulse 10,000 times a second; each pulse will release about 20 trillion photons. Only about a dozen photons hit Earth’s surface and return to the satellite.’

NASA is poised to launch Saturday its most advanced space laser ever, ICESat-2, a $1 billion dollar mission to reveal the depths of the Earth’s melting ice as the climate warms, says Phys.org.

The half-ton satellite, about the size of a smart-car, is scheduled to blast off atop a Delta II rocket on September 15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.