Study points to metal powders as potential replacement for fossil fuels

Could fireworks technology replace fossil fuels?
[image credit: boston.com]

Cynics may suspect a well-timed bid for a headline, but this story just happened to turn up at phys.org this week. There are sure to be snags – aren’t there?

Can you imagine a future where your car is fueled by iron powder instead of gasoline?

Metal powders, produced using clean primary energy sources, could provide a more viable long-term replacement for fossil fuels than other widely discussed alternatives, such as hydrogen, biofuels or batteries, according to a study in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Applied Energy.

#COP21 The morning after the night before

Nearly 200 countries have [signed up] to the most expensive agreement in history amid a party atmosphere in Paris, now comes the hangover.

Part 2: CET, Met Office making up data

Tim writes: here we have a demonstration of both sides of scientific and organisational integrity. Ten years later, 2005, there was confirmation of the poor practice.

Some time ago Part 1 was published

• Talkshop repost by Roger
• deadalearch

The last line of the 1995 email was withheld. Here it is

Our daily series is anchored to the monthly one so that
each months average calculated from the daily data equals its value
in Manleys monthly series.

The Met Office promote “Hadley Centre Central England Temperature” and HadCET but avoid “Manley CET”. There was and is no daily Manley CET. The Met Office made one up, adjusting daily figures to average the Manley CET monthly value exactly.

January 1974 onwards there is no Manley CET data to constrain Met Office daily figures.

Above is an image of the email, the verbatim server files from US publishing site are here inside a zip. File timestamps are preserved, presumably from original FTP disk write here on a contemporary computer system.

Doug Proctor: What #COP21 agreement means

Doug Proctor has gone over the decision at COP21 for us.

1. Everybody gets to do what he wants to do, without repercussions other than official notes in the media of progress vis-a-vis what he said.

2. Nothing has to be done that “threatens” food production. Not “reduces”, but threatens. This should allow cutting down forests and the slash-and-burn style of agriculture, and exempt agricultural practices, including beef production, from carbon-taxes, fuel surcharges or the need to make them less CO2 heavy.

3. Financing is neither fixed, nor firm, but voluntary and without a timeframe. Financing is still at the stage of ‘determining’ what others may need. There is no “SHALL” involved with collection or redistribution of funds.

First flywheel hybrid energy storage plant in Europe is opened

Irish transmission line [image credit: thejournal.ie]

Nothing about costs, but let’s see how this demonstration project goes. The technology has already been tried in cars.

Europe’s first flywheel hybrid energy storage plant has been officially launched in Ireland, reports PEI.

The plant in Rhode, County Offaly, is owned and operated by Irish energy company Schwungrad Energie and is expected to enter a test operational phase in February.

Melting Scandinavian glaciers may offer clue to Younger Dryas mystery

[credit:geowords.com]
Note: Tallbloke’s Talkshop is non – profit and use is for educational purposes only.

Scientists have found an explanation for one of the big mysteries in climate science with the help of 12,000-year old Swedish midges, reports ScienceNordic.

A combination of fossilised midges and climate modelling suggest that melting ice sheets in Scandinavia triggered a dramatic 1,000-year long cold snap in Europe 12,800 years ago. Temporary and extreme climate changes punctuated the warming of the Northern Hemisphere as the Earth escaped the icy grip of the last Ice Age.

One such event occurred 12,800 years ago–the so-called Younger Dryas–when Europe was suddenly plunged back into near-Ice Age conditions. The ensuing cold struck Europe and Russia quickly, and hard. But how and why remained a mystery.

Paris Climate Challenge Releases Summary Statement

In association with the
Independent Committee on Geoethics www. www.geoethic.com
and the Collectif des Climato Réalistes www.www.skyfall.fr

Summary Statement
Over thirty years of intense (and extremely expensive) research has totally failed to produce any evidence that human emissions of CO2 are driving climate. CO2 is not a danger to but a benefit for all life on our planet.

We call on governments, NGOs and universities to stop pursuing policy and dogma based ‘evidence’ gathering.

Gordon Valentine Manley and his work

This recent paper turned up when I was looking for information on Manley of CET fame. This may be of interest to some readers. Side effect I can reference this from an article I am producing on CET.

Endfield, G. H., Veale, L. and Hall, A. (2015), Gordon Valentine Manley and his contribution to the study of climate change: a review of his life and work. WIREs Clim Change, 6: 287–299. doi: 10.1002/wcc.334

To my surprise with Wiley group this appears to be open access.

Quoting a quote from the paper

“Have you ever wondered why we in this country
have been so active? Have you ever looked at a world
population map and wondered why the great ‘blobs’
of world population are where they are? Have you
ever wondered why the active subscribers of world
civilisations are primarily in Europe?”

Arctic ice data conflict, example of software tool usage

Moderator Tim Channon writes: This article is unusual for the Talkshop. I may for personal reasons be leaving the Talkshop, a consequence of recent serious troubles, why I have been quiet. I hope this proves untrue.
I want to get some items out in the world for others. From my point of view leave a legacy. I am releasing the Synth software, done rapidly so none of this is neat or complete.

This is a simple example of usage with perhaps some current interest. No answers are intended for more the whole idea is about gaining insight by you playing around with data and ideas.

Figure 1

According to published datasets the characteristics of sea ice changed around 2006/7. Dataset used here is NSIDC/NOAA D02135 monthly. ( if you try and decode the published data, read the notes, has offsets which need compensation, do not use as is)

Based on experience I think this change is in the data gathering, perhaps geometry, not actual ice change. In the past in various articles I’ve mentioned some of the dubious practices.

Patrick Moore: Greenpeace has made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth

 

By Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace

Greenpeace, in furtherance of what is in effect its war against every species on the planet, has now turned to what, on the face of things, looks to me like outright breach of the RICO, wire-fraud, witness-tampering and obstruction-of-committee statutes. I have called in the FBI.

Greenpeace appears to have subjected Dr Will Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, to a maladroit attempt at entrapment that has badly backfired on it.

The organization I founded has become a monster. When I was a member of its central committee in the early days, we campaigned – usually with success – on genuine environmental issues such as atmospheric nuclear tests, whaling and seal-clubbing.

When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.

Space – the final commercial frontier, says new US law

Lift-off [image credit: NASA]

US businesses can now legally be space invaders, as Phys.org reports. They can boldly go looking for extra-terrestrial riches wherever they like.

Flashing some interplanetary gold bling and sipping “space water” might sound far-fetched, but both could soon be reality, thanks to a new US law that legalizes cosmic mining.

In a first, President Barack Obama signed legislation at the end of November that allows commercial extraction of minerals and other materials, including water, from asteroids and the moon.

That could kick off an extraterrestrial gold rush, backed by a private aeronautics industry that is growing quickly and cutting the price of commercial space flight.

Video of Interviews with Paris Climate Challenge attendees

Piers Corbyn brought a friend, Mark, to the Paris Climate Challenge who helped enormously with the video editing and interviewing work. He runs his own site called ‘Windows on the World’ where he has posted a half hour program showing interviews with some of the attendees at the Paris Climate Challenge, including Niklas Morner, Franco Maranzana and Philip Foster.

Click the image to see the video at Mark’s site – help raise his hit count please.

We were unable to cover any of Mark’s expenses from our shoestring budget and we’d like to, as he’s on a shoestring budget himself. If anyone would like to help, please use the donate button in the top left corner of the talkshop. All donations, of whatever size are appreciated.  – Thanks for your help. With it, we can keep on fighting the corruption and disinformation wrecking science’s good name and impoverishing the ordinary people of the world.

Solar forcing as an important trigger for West Greenland sea-ice variability over the last millennium

H/T to Andrew for alerting me to this new paper published in Quaternary Science Reviews.

From the paper:

Fig. 5. Reconstructed sea-ice concentrations from core GA306-GC4 compared to the 14C production rate corrected for the fossil fuel (Suess) effect for the period from 1850 to 1950 AD (Muscheler et al., 2007). (a) The direct comparison of sea-ice concentration (blue) and 14C production rate (red), as well as with DTSI (orange; difference of total solar irradiance from 1365.57 W/m2 ) (Steinhilber et al., 2012)

To investigate the feedback processes linking solar activity and sea-ice cover, we used the coupled climate model COSMOS, which indicates that a decrease in solar radiation results in increased sea-ice cover (Fig. 7a) and decreased sea-surface temperature (Fig. 7b). A strong negative correlation between sea-ice variability and solar forcing is observed along the eastern and southwestern coast of Greenland and in the Arctic Ocean, indicating that in this model solar variability is critical for simulating changes in local sea-ice production. A small change in incoming shortwave radiation, and associated ice-albedo effects, resulted in a large response of local ice formation, according to ‘bottom-up’ (solar heating of the sea surface) mechanisms (Gray et al., 2010; Hunke et al., 2010).

AKATSUKI: Second attempt to enter Venus orbit

Just about now…

The Venus Climate Orbiter AKATSUKI will try to enter the orbit of Venus on Dec. 7 (Mon.) after five years of operation. We are welcoming support messages.

Ken Ring: The Nonsense That is Ozone-Depletion

Chris Curnow

December 6, 2015 at 12:01 am

a quote from “The Nonsense That is Ozone-Depletion”
by Ken Ring (2009) at http://www.ourcivilisation.com/ozone/king.htm
One Hole is Larger than the Other
Let’s look at one last factor, so often reported; that the Antarctic hole is larger than the Arctic one. One would think that even if inert heavier-than-air substances could make it up into space, that they would do it more around the densely populated regions of earth — the northern hemisphere; and affect the Arctic Hole more than the Antarctic. No one is disputing that the hole over the Antarctic is definitely much bigger. The Southern hemisphere has a longer winter than the Northern hemisphere because Earth is further from the sun in July than in January. Longer winter means bigger hole. But also maybe, some chlorine is coming from some other source, instead of CFCs. Let’s look around.

Aha! Just a few miles upwind from the Antarctic camp where all the readings about ozone-depletion originate from, is a rather large hill called Mt Erebus.

Patrick Moore: Two Climate Conferences in Paris

Paris – There are two climate conferences going on in Paris this month. One, the 21^st Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP21) attended by about 40,000 people, and the other, The Paris Climate Challenge 2015, attended by about 40 people.

The big conference is conveniently situated next to Europe’s largest private jetport, all the better to bring in the thousands of dignitaries from around the world. How else could they attend without flying in fossil-fuel-powered aircraft? There is no discussion of science at this conference as the science is considered to be settled. Catastrophic human-caused global warming and climate change will be upon us unless we can keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius. The only way to do that is a drastic reduction in fossil fuel consumption with a goal of terminating it altogether as soon as possible. This would eliminate 85 percent of civilization’s energy supply in a world where more that a billion people still have no electricity.

But there is little chance such a draconian policy will prevail. It has already been made clear by US President Obama, that despite his predictions of  “abandoned cities and submerged countries” that any “agreement” reached at COP21 will have no legally binding status and will therefore be a very expensive piece of window dressing.

No trends in precip anywhere from 1850

Nice day

From the dept of unsexy climate headlines we get news that there’s no news so far as precipitation is concerned. A new paper which examines a HUUUUGE number of records worldwide finds that there’s no trends anywhere of any significance from 1850. So much for dire warnings of increased droughts and floods due to extra CO2 which DO grab the headlines.

Changes in annual precipitation over the Earth’s land mass excluding Antarctica from the 18th century to 2013

• W.A. van Wijngaarden^, ,
• A. Syed

 
Highlights

•

Over 1½ million monthly precipitation totals observed at 1000 stations in 114 countries analysed.

•

Data record much longer than 3 recent conflicting studies that analysed a few decades of data.

•

No substantial difference found for stations located at northern, tropical and southern latitudes.

•

No substantial difference found for stations experiencing dry, moderate and wet climates.

•

No significant global precipitation change from 1850 to present.

 

#COP21: The game is afoot

After the Lord Mayor’s show of the first day, comes the nitty gritty and the battle over brackets and red lines

Italy’s Etna in most dramatic eruption in 20 years

Etna’s 2002 eruption, photographed from the ISS
[image credit: NASA]

Fire and hot ash spewed high into the sky from Italy’s Mount Etna in Sicily Friday, in one of the most dramatic eruptions of Europe’s highest active volcano in the past 20 years, reports Yahoo News.

The volcano on the Mediterranean island threw up an ash column some seven kilometres (4.3 miles) high with lava flowing from the Voragine crater for the first time in two years, the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) said.

Tony Thomas: When Scientists Still Did Science

My thanks to Tony Thomas for this illuminating piece of science-history, first published at Quadrant online.

A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff  then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away…

Letter from the Australian Federal Minister for Science, W.L. (Bill) Morrison, to the President of the Academy of Science,  Professor Badger,  January 9, 1975:

Dear Professor Badger,
I am writing on this occasion to enquire if the Academy could assist the Government by examining, and reporting on, claims recently made in the media, and apparently also by competent scientists that the earth’s climate is changing and that a new ice-age could be on the way.