Greenland Ice Varies, Don’t Panic

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‘Once again, history is a better guide than hysteria.’ — Indeed, but hysteria makes bigger headlines, which are the aim of the climate alarm game. But in the end, we will all be the losers if we fall for it.

Science Matters

The scare du jour is about Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) and how it will melt out and flood us all.  It’s declared that GIS has passed its tipping point, and we are doomed.  Typical is the Phys.org hysteria: Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:  “Greenland’s massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.”

Panic is warranted only if you treat this as proof of an alarmist narrative and ignore the facts and context in which natural variation occurs. For starters, consider the last four years of GIS fluctuations reported by DMI and summarized in the eight graphs above.  Note the noisy blue lines showing how the surface mass balance (SMB) changes its daily weight by 8 or 10 gigatonnes (Gt) around the baseline mean from 1981…

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Electric roads will help cut UK road freight emissions, report says

E-truck test route [image credit: transport-online.de]

The bill for such a system would be massive and a lot of fuel duty revenue would be lost. What does it offer to anyone outside the haulage industry?
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Electrification of 7,500 km of the UK’s major road network would enable most lorries to be powered by overhead charging cables, resulting in dramatically reduced carbon emissions, a new report has found.

A team from the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (SRF) – bringing together heavy vehicle engineering expertise from the Department of Engineering and logistics expertise from Heriot-Watt University and the University of Westminster and a consortium of industry partners—has proposed that building a so-called ‘electric road system’ could be used to decarbonise 65% of UK lorry kilometers traveled by 2040, says TechXplore.

California doomed to frequent blackouts due to battery shortage – Bloomberg Green

A self-induced shortage of reliable electricity generation is the real issue in California but its leaders can’t accept that, for mistaken ideological reasons supposedly related to the climate of the Earth. Instead they create their own problems due to unworkable energy policies, then discover they can’t solve them. Other leaders with similar ideas should take note and learn, but probably won’t, preferring to parrot ‘net zero’.

H/T The GWPF
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Problem is there aren’t enough of these massive batteries to go around right now, says Bloomberg Green.

As the threat of blackouts continues to plague California, officials are pointing to battery storage as a key to preventing future power shortfalls.

Big oil need not apply: UK raises the bar for UN climate summit – then all head for the airport?

What do these sanctimonious blowhards imagine all the journeys to the conference — without which it wouldn’t take place at all — will be powered by? The hypocrisy is epic.
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The UK government will not accept sponsorship from fossil fuel companies for next year’s UN climate summit in Glasgow, Climate Home News understands.

Like in previous years, the UK hosts of the two-week event are seeking corporate sponsors to shoulder some of the cost, initially estimated at £250 million ($330m).

Unlike in previous years, which have seen large polluters use such deals to bolster their green credentials, sponsors of Cop26 are expected to have a credible plan to cut their emissions to net zero by 2050, the official website states.

Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling – Valentina Zharkova

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

But it should be a lot shorter than the famous Maunder Minimum, if the prediction in this editorial works out. There’s also a new paper, introduced here by the GWPF, which concludes:
“The fundamental oscillations of solar irradiance, in turn, may be linked to the oscillations of the baseline terrestrial temperature, independent of any terrestrial processes of radiative transfer and heating.”
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In this editorial I will demonstrate with newly discovered solar activity proxy-magnetic field that the Sun has entered into the modern Grand Solar Minimum (2020–2053) that will lead to a significant reduction of solar magnetic field and activity like during Maunder minimum leading to noticeable reduction of terrestrial temperature.

Sun is the main source of energy for all planets of the solar system. This energy is delivered to Earth in a form of solar radiation in different wavelengths, called total solar irradiance.

Variations of solar irradiance lead to heating of upper planetary atmosphere and complex processes of solar energy transport toward a planetary surface.

The signs of solar activity are seen in cyclic 11-year variations of a number of sunspots on the solar surface using averaged monthly sunspot numbers as a proxy of solar activity for the past 150 years.

Solar cycles were described by the action of solar dynamo mechanism in the solar interior generating magnetic ropes at the bottom of solar convective zone.

These magnetic ropes travel through the solar interior appearing on the solar surface, or photosphere, as sunspots indicating the footpoints where these magnetic ropes are embedded into the photosphere.

Continued here.
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Appendix 1: S-E distances from the ephemeris

Appendix 2: Solar irradiance variations based on the distance changes

UK National Lottery fund jumps on climate change bandwagon

Lottery balls

Not many organisations can resist the pressure to resort to imagined virtue signalling in the era of the fake human-caused climate emergency, but there’s no jackpot from this losing bet.
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The first grants as part of a ten-year £100m National Lottery-funded Climate Action Fund have been rolled-out to communities across the UK to help tackle climate change, reports Casino Beats.

The National Lottery Community Fund has announced an initial £14m in grants as it aims to reduce the carbon footprint of communities and support movements that can demonstrate what is possible when people take the lead in tackling climate change.

Financial aid from The National Lottery Community Fund will support these projects to work together, share learning and be catalysts for broader and transformative change.

California’s Blackout Warning

Solar power complex in California [USA. Gov – BLM – Bureau of Land Management]

How does it feel to be the canaries in the coal mine of the renewables stampede now being promoted far and wide by climate obsessives with a failing atmospheric theory?

H/T The GWPF
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Anti-fossil fuel mandates are leading to electricity shortages.

Electricity blackouts are awful at any time, but especially during an extreme heat wave and for reasons that are man-made, says The Wall Street Journal.

That’s what millions in California have been enduring in recent days, and their plight is a warning to the rest of America about the risks of Green New Deal policies.

The California Independent System Operator (Caiso), which manages the state’s power grid, declared a high-level emergency Friday and Saturday evenings and ordered utilities to reduce power usage.

California and most of the southwestern U.S. are experiencing a severe heat wave. But other states are managing to keep power flowing. Why can’t California?

Renewable biogas from cow manure injected into grid in UK first

UK first or UK farce? Another consequence of the irrational fear of trace gases in the atmosphere.
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Renewable biogas made from cow manure has been injected into the National Grid in a UK first which will create enough energy to power ten homes for a year, reports yahoo! news.

The Murrow Anaerobic Digestion Plant in Cambridgeshire mixed the manure with straw and left it in an oxygen-free environment to produce methane, which has been sold to the grid so people can use it to cook meals and heat their homes.

Biogas is being increasingly looked at by energy companies as it offers far better carbon emissions savings than natural methane gas.

Ian Plimer: The Australian Press Council is a hive of climate zealots

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Truth-starved climate propaganda and its backers get a good going-over from the ever-robust Professor.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
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As a result of an activist campaign, the Australian Press Council took exception to my article in The Australian on November 22, 2019, says Ian Plimer @ Spectator AU.

They claimed that my statement that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims” was false.

Journalists in the Press Council should know basic English and the difference between an element (carbon) and a compound (carbon dioxide).

This is elementary schoolkid’s science. For the Press Council to claim that this is factually incorrect shows breathtaking ignorance.

Kyoto University and Toyota test 1,000 km per-charge EV battery

Toyota’s Prius model

They say solid-state batteries – unlike lithium-ion ones – can’t catch fire, but on the other hand the electrolyte needs to be warmed up. Years of technical challenges still lie ahead, it seems.
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A team of researchers from Kyoto University and Toyota Motor is making solid progress developing next-generation battery technology that has the potential to cram far more energy into a small, lightweight package than today’s standard lithium-ion, or li-ion, batteries, says Nikkei Asian Review.

The new fluoride-ion battery the researchers are working on, which would hold about seven times as much energy per unit of weight as conventional li-ion batteries, could allow electric vehicles to run 1,000 km on a single charge.

The team has developed a prototype rechargeable battery based on fluoride, the anion — the negatively charged ion — of elemental fluorine.

BBC promotes its climate agenda on the back of recent train crash

Credit: BBC

Another round of the usual ‘scientists agree’ assertions without saying which scientists, what exactly they supposedly agree on, and where the evidence – if it exists – can be found.
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It’s already clear that torrential rain played a significant part in the first fatal derailment in the UK since 2007.

Scotland’s Transport Minister Michael Matheson has confirmed the conditions were a factor and Network Rail footage shows there were landslides in the area.

The climate is changing and scientists agree it’s very different to when the railways were built by our Victorian ancestors, claims BBC News.

Though landslips are not uncommon, particularly in that area around Stonehaven, climate change means they are happening much more frequently as the land struggles to cope with the volume of water.

Claim: cutting speed limits could slow climate change

The assertion being of course that human-caused emissions of the trace gas carbon dioxide somehow have a specific effect on the Earth’s climate, which must be countered. But if everyone is forced into electric cars, the speed limit argument becomes obsolete. Lower speed limits also mean more vehicles on the road at any one time, trying to complete their journeys, which in turn could lead to more traffic delays, potentially undermining the whole idea. As usual they conflate pollution and climate arguments to cause confusion.
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Canadian cities from Edmonton to Montreal are lowering speed limits, primarily in an attempt to save lives, says CBC News.

But slowing down may also be an easy way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution — not just on urban roadways but also on highways (and even the high seas).

Study outlines five thermal energy grand challenges for decarbonization

Green dreamland

Only five ‘grand’ challenges? Better be quick — we keep hearing there’s supposed to be a climate emergency on. Yes, throw out existing successful energy solutions when there’s nothing of equivalence to replace them with. Then wonder what to do next, while muttering about climate change. Great plan! Or maybe not.
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Solar and wind power are an important part of solving the problem of climate change, but these renewable technologies on their own probably will never provide the energy for many industrial processes, like making steel, reports TechXplore.

Approximately 90 percent of the world’s energy use involves generation or manipulation of heat, including the cooling of buildings and food.

Maintaining modern economies and improving life in developing economies while mitigating climate change will require five major advances in how we convert, store and transmit thermal energy, according to a new paper in Nature Energy from Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

North London bus garage to become ‘virtual power station’

BYD electric bus, London [image credit: China Daily]

What effect this could have on the life of the bus batteries remains to be seen, but it’s unlikely to be beneficial. The efficiency or otherwise of the power transfer process is also open to question.
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A north London bus garage is to become the world’s largest trial site for a new eco-friendly method of generating electricity, reports the Evening Standard.

Northumberland Park garage is to be transformed into a “virtual power station” – taking energy stored in the batteries of parked electric buses and feeding it back into the electricity network.

Putting energy back into the grid when demand is high and recharging buses when demand is low helps make the network more efficient by balancing the peaks and troughs.

The Government-funded Bus2Grid project will become operational in November and will run for three years.

Cosmic Rays and the Weakening Solar Cycle

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Which brings us back to the old conundrum: do cosmic rays affect the Earth’s weather / climate, and if so, how and how much?

Spaceweather.com

August 11, 2020: Cosmic rays are bad–and they’re probably going to get worse.

That’s the conclusion of a new study entitled “Galactic Cosmic Radiation in Interplanetary Space Through a Modern Secular Minimum” just published in the journal Space Weather.

“During the next solar cycle, we could see cosmic ray dose rates increase by as much as 75%,” says lead author Fatemeh Rahmanifard of the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center. “This will limit the amount of time astronauts can work safely in interplanetary space.”

Cosmic rays are the bane of astronauts. They come from deep space, energetic particles hurled in all directions by supernova explosions and other violent events. No amount of spacecraft shielding can stop the most energetic particles, leaving astronauts exposed whenever they leave the Earth-Moon system.

Back in the 1990s, astronauts could travel through space for as much as 1000 days before they…

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Scientists invent smart electricity-storing bricks from ordinary ones

Electric storage heating has been around for decades, but this is a bit different, storing power rather than heat. After a predicted 10,000 recharge cycles performance may degrade. The researchers say: ‘Our supercapacitor technology adds value to a “dirt-cheap” construction material and demonstrates a scalable process affording energy storage for powering embedded microdevices in architectural applications that utilize fired brick.’
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Helping turn ordinary bricks into energy-storing ones is PEDOT — poly polystyrene sulfonate — a polymer that stores and conducts electricity, says MEA WorldWide.

The walls of your home are capable of storing electricity, like batteries. It would need two materials: the humble red bricks and plastic, according to scientists who turned ordinary bricks into “smart” ones in their new study.

It opens up the possibility of plugging gadgets directly into American homes.

In fact, bricks are known for absorbing and storing the sun’s heat. And because buildings can take up large amounts of space, researchers from Washington University in St Louis wondered if it can also store electricity. So they began testing the feasibility of the idea.

Past evidence supports complete loss of Arctic sea ice by 2035, say researchers

Still waiting

Climate modellers have a fairly dismal record in trying to predict sea ice patterns in the Arctic, always erring on the side of too much warming. Will this research do anything to improve matters? They seem to be using Earth’s past climate as a guide, while asserting that human-caused carbon dioxide is the main problem today.
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A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035, reports Phys.org.

High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial—the warm period around 127,000 years ago—have puzzled scientists for decades.

Now the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an international team of researchers to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during the last interglacial with present day.

Their findings are important for improving predictions of future sea ice change.

Cascading Fallacies In Climate Risk Assessment

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Where are the limits of climate fantasy? New Zealand seems to be pushing them with this ‘assessment’.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

As a logician, I am always on the lookout for fallacies and there is no lack of them in climate change alarmist policies. New Zealand’s newly released climate risk assessment not only has multiple fallacies, they build on one another in a cascade.

This is not about New Zealand. The authors of the assessment make clear that theirs is a new approach which they hope will be used globally. So this is about the world, including America.

The massive report is titled “First national climate change risk assessment for New Zealand.” Under New Zealand’s climate law, these assessments are supposed to be done every five years and this is the first.

The scope is breathtaking. The idea is to identify all of the significant risks due to human caused climate change that will be present in 2050 and 2100. Moreover, these supposed risks are prioritized.

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Two interacting gas giants orbit sun-like star WASP-148

Super-WASP telescope site, La Palma [image credit: lapalma-island.com]

In nearly six years there are 247 b and 63 c orbits. Since 248:62 is 4:1, it can be seen why the observed ‘acceleration and deceleration’ of the planets might occur.
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Astronomers using the SuperWASP-North telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain, and the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France, have discovered two giant exoplanets circling the G-type dwarf star WASP-148, reports Science News.

WASP-148 is a slowly rotating, inactive G-dwarf star 809 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules.

Also known as TYC 3083-295-1 and 2MASS J16563135+4418095, the star has the same mass and radius as the Sun.

WASP-148 hosts a planetary system composed of at least two giant planets, WASP-148b and c.

Renewables in Europe: Land requirement is an area the size of Portugal

We brace ourselves for another visit to green fantasy land (‘according to the study’) where progress to imaginary nirvana is just around the corner, regardless of glaringly obvious realities pointing the other way.
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Transitioning our energy supply from coal, oil and gas to wind and solar power is feasible, claims TechXplore. [Talkshop comment – empty assertion].

However, renewables require more land than conventional forms of energy generation.

The most affordable option for a fully renewable electricity supply in Europe is based on solar parks and onshore windfarms.

However, this solution requires some 97,000 km2 land, or roughly 2% of the total area of the European Union—an area equivalent to the size of Portugal.