Billions pledged for clean energy research at Paris climate talks

[image credit – ECO blog]

Research? The implication of that can only be that the technologies available today are considered inadequate – which of course they are, for various well-known reasons. Energy Voice reports on the queue of entrepreneurs and business leaders hoping for a slice of pie-in-the-sky.

Government and business leaders will pledge billions of pounds to research and develop a technical fix to the planet’s climate woes at high-stakes negotiations in Paris. Clean energy technology is being promoted as the key to fighting global warming at the UN climate summit.

Paris gets the party started #COP21

The latest last chance to save the world has begun, with just 200+ arrests so far.

BBC links Arctic sea-ice loss to sea level rise

In an almost unbelievable display of ignorance or deliberate deception, the BBC on one of its climate alarm pages, links loss of Arctic sea ice to sea level rise. Do they really not understand that floating ice doesn’t change sea level when it melts? Archimedes principle has been around for a couple of thousand years, but it seems the science illiterates at the BBC skipped this class in school.

Paris Climate Challenge -Schedule

The alternative climate conference to COP21 in Paris this year is the Paris Climate Challenge, organised by Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition and Philip Foster, author of several books on climate.

The Schedule has been finalised:

Challenging the groupthink of COP21

Stuart Agnew, Bob Carter, Piers Corbyn, Ed Flaherty, Philip Foster, Roger Helmer, Tom Harris, Donna Laframboise, Viscount Monckton, Patrick Moore, Nils-Axel Mörner, Ian Plimer, [Murry Salby], Roger Tattersall & more …  tba

If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking. – Gen. George Patton

Schedule @ 11 rue La Rochefoucauld 75009 Paris

TUESDAY 1st Dec

10am Coffee/refreshments

10.30am start

Per Strandberg: ENSO caused by tidal pulses during Perigee and by solar activity

My thanks to Per Strandberg for this update on his ENSO modelling effort. This is looking good, and is based on a neural network which uses lunar and solar data for its input.

There are two main drivers of ENSO. ENSO stands for El Niño Southern oscillation and is Earth’s most influential weather phenomena after seasonal changes. When ENSO changes it causes changes in currents and of temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

The most important ENSO driver is linked to variations in gravitational tidal forcing associated with Moon’s Perigee. Moon is in what is called Perigee, when the Moon is at it closest point during its elliptical orbit around Earth. This is also when the tidal force caused by the Moon is at its strongest.

The second most important forcing is linked to variation in solar activity.

QC work: Sunspot areas and tilt angles for solar cycles 7 – 10

New paper in A&A of interest to some Talkshop readers. The authors use drawings by Schwabe, from there estimate details about solar marks. Recently solar cycle 24 has been likened to solar cycle 7, adding interest

Sunspot areas and tilt angles for solar cycles 7–10
V. Senthamizh Pavai, R. Arlt, M. Dasi-Espuig, N.A. Krivova, and S. K. Solanki
A&A 584, A73 (2015)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201527080
Open access on registration

 

Fig.2. Example of the drawing style in the initial period of 1825-1830.
This full-disk drawing of 1827 June 13 shows large spots which com-
bine several umbrae and at least part of the penumbral area, as is re-
vealed by the detailed drawings.

The 2016 Cartoons by Josh Calendar is out

Get it while it’s fresh here

Josh says:

The Calendar has cartoons from the past year, mostly on Energy, Environment and Climate Change topics.
This year there are also political cartoons and caricatures.

COP21: Public support for tough climate deal ‘declines’

But not the end he was thinking of ? [credit: wizbangblog.com]

Are prophets of climate doom going out of fashion? The BBC fears so.

Public support for a strong global deal on climate change has declined, according to a poll carried out in 20 countries. Only four now have majorities in favour of their governments setting ambitious targets at a global conference in Paris.

In a similar poll before the Copenhagen meeting in 2009, eight countries had majorities favouring tough action. The poll has been provided to the BBC by research group GlobeScan.

Just under half of all those surveyed viewed climate change as a “very serious” problem this year, compared with 63% in 2009.

Why Phi? – the resonance of Jupiter’s Galilean moons

Io, Europa and Ganymede – three of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons

The resonance of three of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter is well-known. Or is it?

We’re usually told there’s a 1:2:4 orbital ratio between Ganymede, Europa and Io, but while this is not far from the truth, a closer look shows something else.

Osborne Cuts Climate Diplomat’s funding and scraps CCS

Two bits of good news from the Autumn statement:

Firstly: Ministers have axed the planned £1bn competition to help develop carbon capture and storage – the technology that the fossil fuel industry hoped would help it drastically cut its carbon emissions.

Companies such as the oil giant Shell had hoped to secure hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of government funding to help develop the technology, which involves trapping the carbon dioxide produced by power stations, trapping it and storing it deep underground before it can reach the atmosphere, writes Kiran Stacey.

Prince Charles – climate change root cause of Syrian war

I suppose this is predictable and plainly nonsense

Prince Charles has pointed to the world’s failure to tackle climate change as a root cause of the civil war in Syria, terrorism and the consequent refugee crisis engulfing Europe.

The heir to the British throne is due to give a keynote speech at the opening of a global climate summit in Paris next week where 118 leaders will gather to try to nail down a deal to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The prince said in an interview with Sky News, to be aired on Monday and recorded before the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, that such symptoms were a “classic case of not dealing with the problem”.

— Reuters http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/11/23/uk-climatechange-summit-charles-idUKKBN0TC0ND20151123

UK pumped storage scheme may lead to others

Dinorwig Power Station in Wales [image credit: Denis Egan @ Wikipedia]

It has to be said this scheme looks very small against the massive Dinorwig set-up (1,728 MW). This type of facility can use surplus off-peak (e.g. overnight) wind power to pump the water up to the top, then send it back down by gravity at any required time to spin the turbines and generate ‘instant’ electricity.

An application has been submitted to begin development on a 99.9 MW pumped hydropower storage facility in Wales, the project’s developers have announced.

Solar hard UV is weakening.

The EUV spectrum of the Sun: Irradiances during 1998–2014
G. Del Zanna 1 and V. Andretta 2
A&A 584, A29 (2015)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201526804
(c) ESO 2015
Open access on registration

Examples from paper Fig 6

From abstract

… show that the irradiances in the hot (2–3 MK) lines are significantly
lower for the cycle 24 maximum compared to the previous one.

From Introduction

1. Introduction
The present paper is part of an on-going effort to provide the
best possible solar spectral irradiance in the extreme ultraviolet
(EUV). The solar EUV variability causes dramatic changes in
the temperature and density of the thermosphere, and it could
also have some indirect effects on the climate. Indeed, some of
the current global circulation models also require EUV irradi-
ances to properly take the solar forcing into account.

US Senate warns: No money for Obama’s Paris climate promises

Much ado about nothing?

The Paris climate conference is already looking like an expensive waste of time, judging by this report.

The US Senate sent a powerful and unmistakable message to UN climate delegates this week: Don’t expect any US money for Obama’s climate promises.

52 U.S. Senators voted to block an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule this week that would curb carbon emissions from existing coal-fired power plants. Passing the resolution without a veto-proof vote (the President has already promised not to sign it) makes this act of defiance symbolic only. But with the Paris climate summit just a week and a half away, it’s powerful symbolism indeed.

Record Crushing Fraud From NOAA And NASA Ahead Of Paris

Real Science

Gavin and Tom delivered their fraud right on schedule ahead of Paris, just as I predicted they would. They claim that October had the highest temperature anomaly ever recorded for any month.

Record-crushing October keeps Earth on track for hottest year in 2015 – The Washington Post

Somehow, they managed to calculate Earth’s temperature within 0.01 degrees – even though they had no temperature data for about half of the land surface, including none in Greenland and very little in Africa or Antarctica.

201510.gif (990×765)

This kind of mind-blowing malfeasance would get them fired and probably escorted out of the building by security at many engineering companies.

Satellites cover almost the entire planet several times a day, and they showed that October had only the 25th highest monthly anomaly, and that every month in 1998 had a higher anomaly than October 2015.

 data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLT/time_series/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.txt

Not only do NASA and NOAA make up…

View original post 92 more words

Phi and the Great Pyramid of Khufu

Great Pyramid of Giza from a 19th-century stereopticon card photo [credit: Wikipedia]

Let’s have a look at some numbers for the Great Pyramid.

Source: Building the Great Pyramid (aka Cheops)
Copyright 2006 Franz Löhner and Teresa Zuberbühler

Dimensions as designed (in Egyptian royal cubits):
Length: 440
Height: 280
Slope: 356

Original dimensions as built (a,h and c in the pyramid diagram below):
Length: 230.36m (half = 115.18m)
Height: 146.59m
Slope: 186.42m

UK renewables to be backed up by diesel generators

Diesel generation plant
[image credit: windbyte.co.uk]

The UK’s rush to renewables is about to become even more expensive and pointless with this new anti-green twist, as StopTheseThings points out.

Thanks to its ludicrous wind rush, Britain is reeling with a combination of skyrocketing power prices and a grid on the brink of total collapse: Another Wind Power Collapse has Britain Scrambling to Keep its Lights On (Again).

Now, in the mother of all ironies, Brits are turning to the most inefficient and costly-to-run source of commercial power generation there is: diesel generators. Not, as it turns out, that they have much choice in the matter.

Read the rest here.

The GWPF called it ‘Madness On Stilts.’

Congress asks: warming pause – yes or NOAA?

Seas getting warmer?

Time for the NOAA to front up and explain to US public representatives how it came up with its own temperature data that ran counter to everyone else’s, as GWPF reports.

Scientists and top officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have agreed to start interviews akin to depositions this week with House investigators, who are demanding to know their internal deliberations on a groundbreaking climate change study.

But the interviews may not be enough to placate the chairman of the House science committee, a global warming skeptic who last week stepped up the pressure on the Commerce Department to comply with his subpoena for e-mails that NOAA has refused to turn over.

COP21 website sets out to disprove sceptical arguments

Here’s an amusing page from the French government’s COP21 website. I’ve added comments in bold italics. These people need to answer the the Paris Climate Challenge to support their own position, rather than create strawman arguments put into the mouths of sceptics.

Climate-change sceptics’ main arguments disproved point by point.

Global warming stopped in 1998 – since then, temperatures have barely risen.

This claim is based on the Hadley Center report which showed a rise in average temperature of 0.02°C per decade between 1998 and 2008. It has since been widely publicized by climate-change sceptics and wrongly interpreted as a sign that global warming has stopped. But this set of statistics did not include the Arctic, where temperatures have risen significantly in recent years.

This is incorrect, summer minimum has been stable for the last decade on average.

Era ending for Martin’s Booty

Back in April I noticed this but did not post an article
[UPDATED]

Many people have wandered through the wonderland Martin created during the early years of the world wide web. His painstaking construction of an annotated weather timeline from ancient times up to today.

Booty Meteorological Information Source

IMPORTANT: Some elements on this web site will continue to be maintained as long as I am able – mainly the West Moors local weather data: however, the ‘Weather in History’ section will have to be ‘frozen’ now as I can no longer access the ‘raw data’ to add-to / amend the entries. However, I’m pleased to report that the British Library have offered to archive the entire site (with the ‘Weather in History’ files embedded) and this will mean that the data will be available as long as that organisation is in being: the host web site is HERE: enter the search term ” Booty Meteorological ” into the text box to find the data.