EU member states to re-assert control over national energy policies

Via Benny Peiser at the GWPF

The European Union is being outpaced by the rest of the world on business conditions, a trend that hampers the economic recovery and limits future growth, according to a study from employers’ federation BusinessEurope. “In the race to attract global investment, we more than halved our share.” Overall on energy, “we have much higher political costs in Europe,” Beyrer said, citing renewable-energy policies that cause “market distortion” and environmental efforts that are out of sync with global standards. If the rest of the world doesn’t sign on to the EU’s ambitions for reducing emissions targets, he said it may be time for Europe to “discuss our level of ambition” to avoid economic damage. –Rebecca Christie, Bloomberg, 16 March 2015

Ivo Vegter: When environmentalism becomes a crime against humanity

Guest Post from Ivo Vegtor

These are strong words, but they’re no exaggeration. By whipping up groundless fears about genetically engineered foods and misinforming governments in developing countries, Greenpeace and other anti-GMO lobby groups are condemning millions of people to easily preventable malnutrition and death.

Patrick Moore, a co-founder* and former member of Greenpeace, has accused the environmental group of crimes against humanity over its opposition to Golden Rice, a genetically-modified variety that fortifies rice with vitamin A.

“They [Greenpeace] are wealthy Westerners flying in jets around the world telling other people to stop using fossil fuels,” he writes in an email to me. “They are well fed and they would deny a healthy diet to millions of poor children. They are guilty of a crime against humanity as defined by the International Criminal Court as they are ‘knowingly contributing to the suffering and death of civilian populations’.”

Ed Hoskins: Charting the outcome of the Obama – China climate deal by 2030

Guest Post from Ed Hoskins:

In November 2014, to much fanfare, President Obama concluded an agreement with China on Climate. This was as a precursor to the major Paris climate conference in December 2015, where it is anticipated that a definitive and binding Climate agreement should be reached.  These notes follow through that 2014 agreement as far as it concerns future likely CO2 emissions up until the year 2030.

Essentially the agreement said that whilst Western Nations would be expected to reduce CO2 emissions substantially, China, India and the rest of the developing world would continue its CO2 emissions growth until at least 2030 to ensure that continuing enhancement of the living standards of their populations, and that only then China would limit further growth of its CO2 emissions.

Temperature Adjustments At USCRN1 Stations

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More ‘Adjustments’ to temperature data that look unjustified.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Guest Post by Ron Clutz

View original post 750 more words

Bad News for Trenberth’s Missing Heat – New Study Finds the Deep Oceans Cooled from 1992 to 2011 and…

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Oh my. Kevin Trenberth’s ‘Missing heat’ isn’t in the deep oceans, which have cooled since 1992 according to this new paper.

Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations

…that some of the warming nearer to the surface came from the deep ocean.

The paper is Liang et al. (2015) Vertical Redistribution of Oceanic Heat Content.  The abstract reads (my boldface):

View original post 546 more words

Paul Vaughan: Wind is an dominant player in climate variation

Paul Vaughan writes in suggestions:

It’s the wind.

Rial (2012) drew my attention to a fundamental correction that’s underway in oceanography (more notes forthcoming on this later) ….

Lozier, Susan (2010). Deconstructing the conveyor belt. Science 328, 1507-1511.
http://sites.duke.edu/mslozier/files/2010/11/Lozier_2010.pdf
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Though appealing in its simplicity, the ocean conveyor-belt paradigm has lost luster over the years […] the ocean’s eddy field, unaccounted for just decades ago […] figures prominently in the dismantling of the conveyor-belt paradigm. Another player in this dismantling is the ocean’s wind field. The traditional assignation of surface ocean gyres to wind-forcing and overturning to buoyancy forcing has ignored the vital impact of winds on overturning pathways and mechanics. […] the conveyor-belt model no longer serves the community well […] because it ignores crucial structure and mechanics of the ocean’s intricate global overturning.

[…] wind forcing, rather than buoyancy forcing, can play a dominant role in changing the transport of the overturning […]

Will the March 20th total solar eclipse impact Europe’s solar energy grid?

Residential solar panels in Germany.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons/ Sideka Solartechnik

Could countries heavily committed to solar power like Germany run into problems during next week’s solar eclipse?

Phys.org reports:
The first eclipse of 2015 is coming right up on Friday, March 20th, and may provide a unique challenge for solar energy production across Europe.

Sure, we’ve been skeptical about many of the websites touting a ‘blackout’ and Y2K-like doom pertaining to the March 20th total solar eclipse as of late. And while it’s true that comets and eclipses really do bring out the ‘End of the World of the Week’ -types across ye ole web, there’s actually a fascinating story of science at the core of next week’s eclipse and the challenge it poses to energy production.

But first, a brief recap of the eclipse itself. Dubbed the “Equinox Eclipse,” totality only occurs over a swath of the North Atlantic and passes over distant Faroe and Svalbard Islands. Germany and central Europe can expect an approximately 80% partially obscured Sun at the eclipse’s maximum.

But is there a cause for concern when it comes to energy production?

Read the full report here.
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A wild card here could be the weather next Friday – cloudy or not.

Paper: Simulations of lunar equatorial regolith temperature profile based on measurements of Diviner on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

This recent work will lead to comparing notes

 

Simulations of lunar equatorial regolith temperature profile based on measurements of Diviner on Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
RAN Zhen, WANG ZhenZhan
SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences 2014, Vol. 57 Issue (9): 2232-2241 DOI: 10.1007/s11430-014-4886-4

Abstract

Lunar equatorial regolith temperature profiles were simulated using the half-limited solid heat conduction model. Based on the infrared data measured using the Diviner radiometer on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched by the United Sates in June 2009, three factors influencing temperature profiles were analyzed. The infrared brightness temperature data from Diviner channel 7 were used to retrieve surface temperature. In simulating regolith temperature profiles, the retrieved temperature, rather than temperatures calculated from solar radiance at the lunar surface, were used as the input for surface temperature in solving the heat-conductive equation..

His ’embuggerance’, Sir Terry Pratchett dies at 66,

Image (c) Myrmo under CC

Sir Terry Pratchett, renowned fantasy author, dies aged 66

Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has died aged 66, after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

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The author died at home “with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family,” Mr Finlay said.

— http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-31858156

Lords S&T reprimands government over panic on blackouts “not acceptable”

Image Copyright Roger Kidd under CC

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, 12 March 2015

The Government has managed to “keep the lights on”, but buying in extra ‘safety net’ capacity at short notice has brought costs for the taxpayer and the environment, concludes a Lords report out today.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee declares that the Government should not be congratulated on keeping the lights on. Its report, entitled ‘The Resilience of the Electricity System’, says it is not acceptable for an advanced economy, hugely dependent on electricity, to sail so close to the wind. It found that we have been forced to generate extra capacity in the system, using expensive measures with heavy reliance on fossil fuel generation. The report urges the Government to improve its long-term planning to avoid squeezing the capacity margin like this.

Merchants of spin part 2: Now the film’s director has emailed me!

Image courtesy of Jo Nova

Following Naomi Oreskes message last week, now I’ve had the film director emailing me!

>Director Robert Kenner
> wrote:
>
> Dear Roger,
>
> People who mislead the public on climate change should not be on TV. Period.
>
> That’s one big reason why I produced Merchants of Doubt, a film that lays
> bare the greedy, shameful world of climate denial and the journalists who
> broadcast it. That’s also why, right now, we’re launching a people-powered
> national campaign that could keep climate deniers out of the news for good.
>
> Merchants of Doubt premieres in U.S. theaters today, and it will invite
> thousands of energized viewers to sign this petition and join our campaign.
> Let’s lead the charge!
>
> Join me to tell TV network and cable news directors: Stop booking “merchants
> of doubt” on your programs immediately.

My response:

The Albedo of Earth

“An important new paper finds that the albedo of Earth is highly regulated, mostly by clouds, with some surprising consequences”.

Whoops! Study shows huge basic errors found in CMIP5 climate models

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I wonder if we should take a closer look at this paper to try to work out if this is cockup or coverup. Are these incorrect zenith angles a fudge to cover some other model deficiency for example?

Watts Up With That?

Incoming solar radiation at the Top of the Atmosphere (TOA)

It was just yesterday that we highlighted this unrealistic claim from CMIP5 models: Laughable modeling study claims: in the middle of ‘the pause’, ‘climate is starting to change faster’. Now it seems that there is a major flaw in how the CMIP5 models treat incoming solar radiation, causing up to 30 Watts per square meter of spurious variations. To give you an idea of just how much of an error that is, the radiative forcing claimed to exist from carbon dioxide increases is said to be about 1.68 watts per square meter, a value about 18 times smaller than the error in the CMIP5 models!

The HockeySchtick writes:

New paper finds large calculation errors of solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere in climate models

A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters finds astonishingly large…

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Atlas 5 set to launch Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission

Image credit: Spaceflight Now

NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS) – a stack of four identical satellites sat atop the Atlas 5 rocket, is set for launch this Thursday.

Normalised UK regional temperature

The fuss about extreme rainfall last year tripped me into looking for myself. This led to an innovative analysis of Met Office areal time series for precipitation. There was little interest shown but also little criticism. I’m bringing up Windows 8.1 64 here, same hardware, testing various codebases.
As a wonder-if… the Met Office publish areal series for air temperature, Tmean, Tmax and Tmin. Daft idea, pull one file and eyeball, looks the same data format as rainfall. Do the lazy thing, copy code to a new directory, few trivial edits and hit go. It works. The results look sane.

Tmean for East Scotland, one of 68 plots. The four PDF, Tmean, Tmax, Tmin and Precipitation are linked later. Zoom to any scale works on what are postscript vector data, details can be seen.

A take-home from seeing the results is the episodic nature of weather. Mostly it is bouncing around as weather does but also there are sustained periods with less noise and perhaps floods or droughts, warm or chilly. The temperature data says we have recently had cool and then warm episode. Where this is notable it seems to last for around a year, as-if anything is a definite rule.

Royal Soc celebrates 350 years by giving free access in March

Go grab your free content while it’s free. 🙂

McNider and Christy: We don’t understand systems we can’t model

It was the scientific skeptics who bucked the ‘consensus’ and said the Earth was round.
By Richard McNider And John Christy Updated Feb. 19, 2014

In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the “Flat Earth Society” for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said, “We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts.” But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts?

In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today’s scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round?

Christopher Booker: Revolving door between DECC and £8Bn Offshore Wind Megaproject

Gold in them there windmills
The Telegraph
Christopher Booker
21 February 2015

The BBC didn’t tell us all the facts in its excitement about a vast new offshore wind farm, writes Christopher Booker

The BBC naturally got very excited by the news that Ed Davey, our Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, has given the go-ahead to the largest offshore wind farm in the world – 400 monster turbines covering 436 square miles of the North Sea.

What the BBC didn’t mention was that this £8 billion project, producing on average 840 megawatts of electricity, will earn for its mainly Norwegian and German owners some £900 million a year in subsidies, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.

Drill into Mars for clues to Earth’s climate

River Thames in 1677

New Scientist has a new angle on the Little Ice Age, asking: ‘Can Martian holes give climate clues?’

Digging a hole on another world may settle a nagging question about Earth’s climate.

From about 1300 to 1870, much of the Earth is thought to have endured a long cold snap dubbed the Little Ice Age. If such a freeze occurred, it is usually blamed on a dip in solar activity, but there are other suspects such as volcanoes.

If the sun was responsible, we should see evidence of it across the solar system, says Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland. To settle the debate, he suggests digging a hole on Mars to see if it, too, had an ice age around that time.

Robert M Wilson: On The Distribution of Sunspot Cycle Periods

Back in 1987, Robert M Wilson of NASA’s Space Science Laboratory in Huntsville published this paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. It’s important to our solar-planetary theory because it shows that the Sun is bi-modal in terms of its solar cycle lengths. They cluster around  periods of a little over ten and a little under twelve years. These periods correlate to the periods of Jupiter-Earth-Venus syzygy cycles and Jupiter’s orbital period respectively. Leif Svalgaard vehemently denied this correlation when I pointed it out to him a few years ago.

The same correlation was noted by independent researcher Timo Niroma in 1989, who conducted his own survey and analysis of solar cycle lengths. He produced this simple ascii-art graphic to present his results.