Increasing emissions despite an ever increasing share of renewables

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The road to hell is paved with supposedly good intentions.

Trust, yet verify

In an earlier post I made the remark that the 2015 emissions of Germany are considered to be higher compared to 2014. There were also an article on the Agora-energiewende-site that said something similar. In the meanwhile Green Budget Germany made an estimate for 2015 based on the energy consumption. The numbers don’t exactly match those I saw in the Greenpeace brochure, but the trend seems similar. I understand that those are estimations and there seems to be more than one estimation. According to the estimate, CO₂-eq. emissions rose by 10 Mton (from 902 to 912 Mton) in 2015 compared to 2014:

Source: Clean Energy Wire, data from German Environment Agency (UBA) and Green Budget Germany

That should be food for thought for the many supporters of the energiewende. Germany invested heavily in the transition and the share of alternative energy went up incredibly. Yet even with that…

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US Court orders White House to release ‘Global Warming Causes Severe Winter’ documents

Public information?

Another attempted US ‘climate cover-up’ has run into legal opposition, as the GWPF reports. This time it’s the ‘more warmth causes more cold’ argument in the firing line. If there’s nothing to hide surely there’s no need to fight?

On January 8, 2014, the White House posted a controversial video claiming that global warming causes more severe winter cold. Called “The Polar Vortex Explained in 2 Minutes,” it featured the director of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP), claiming that a “growing body of evidence” showed that the “extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States” at the time was “a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”

GCHQ saves UK smart meter system from potential mass hack

image credit: takebackyourpower.net

It’s not even been rolled out yet, but already the UK’s ultra-expensive new smart meter system has hit a security problem, reports PEI.

The UK’s electronic intelligence agency has had to act with haste to secure smart meters destined for large scale roll-out, after a security loophole was discovered on the devices. GCHQ intervened to change the original designs and save the £11bn nationwide system of smart energy meters against hackers on discovery of a fault, which meant all of the meters were given the same encryption key.

The mystery of Minnesota’s disappearing river

Devil’s Kettle at Judge C. R. Magney State Park [image credit: Chris857 / Wikipedia]

OK, slight exaggeration – Wikipedia says: ‘Judge C. R. Magney State Park is a state park of Minnesota, USA, on the North Shore of Lake Superior…best known for the Devil’s Kettle, an unusual waterfall and rock formation in which half of the Brule River disappears into a pothole.’
So where does it go?

The river splits in two to flow around a mass of rhyolite rock. The eastern flow goes over a two-step, 50-foot (15 m) waterfall and continues downstream. The western flow surges into a pothole, falling at least 10 feet (3.0 m), and disappears underground.

It is believed the water rejoins the main channel of the river or has a separate outlet into Lake Superior, but it has never been located. Researchers have dropped brightly colored dyes, ping pong balls, and other objects into the Devil’s Kettle without result.

EU REFERENDUM: WHO SPEAKS FOR YOU?

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The Moray Mint cuts to the dark heart of the matter. Our political class are deceiving us and her majesty’s opposition are absent, or suppressed.

Moraymint Chatter

Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission

Post # 1-of-4 on the subject of the UK’s EU Referendum: how will you decide which way to vote?         A Punter’s Guide.

Who Speaks for You?

Hello and welcome to Moraymint Chatter.  I’m assuming you’re here because you saw the notice I placed in The Northern Scot newspaper this week.  In any case, thanks for looking in.  As my Northern Scot notice implies, democracy in Moray has gone a bit pear shaped when it comes to the debate about whether the UK should ‘Remain’ in the European Union, or ‘Leave’ the Union.  The political class in Moray in particular, and in Scotland as a whole – the Scottish Nationalists, the Tories, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, The Green Party – have all decided to coalesce around a predetermined view: the UK will be better off remaining in the…

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Climate repeats as fractals, say researchers

Frost fractals [image credit: Schnobby – Wikipedia]

JunkScience.com has turned up some research with a new way of looking at natural climate variations here.

Climate variations analyzed 5 million years back in time
The key phrase is…

Even though we do not know the climate variations in detail so far back…

But details matter. The media release is below.

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Climate variations analyzed 5 million years back in time
UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN – NIELS BOHR INSTITUTE

When we talk about climate change today, we have to look at what the climate was previously like in order to recognise the natural variations and to be able to distinguish them from the human-induced changes. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have analysed the natural climate variations over the last 12,000 years, during which we have had a warm interglacial period and they have looked back 5 million years to see the major features of the Earth’s climate. The research shows that not only is the weather chaotic, but the Earth’s climate is chaotic and can be difficult to predict. The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature Communications.

The Earth’s climate system is characterised by complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, ice sheets, landmasses and the biosphere (parts of the world with plant and animal life). Astronomical factors also play a role in relation to the great changes like the shift between ice ages, which typically lasts about 100,000 years and interglacial periods, which typically last about 10-12,000 years.

Climate repeats as fractals

Winds hide Atlantic variability from Europe’s winters

Out in the Atlantic Ocean [image credit: NASA]

Researchers claim to have ‘discovered a cycle of heating and cooling at the surface of the ocean’ in the North Atlantic which is modulated – so to speak – by winds, although they are also quick to make the obligatory nod in the direction of assumed future ‘global warming’.

Shifting winds may explain why long-term fluctuations in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures have no apparent influence on Europe’s wintertime temperatures.

Rare ‘fairy circles’ discovered in Western Australia

Fairy circles in Namibia’s Marienfluss valley
[image credit: Thorsten Becker]

Similar circles have only previously been found in Namibia, as ABC News reports. With regard to the hexagonal formations, the researchers say: ‘we demonstrate that these patterns emerge by self-organization.’

The chance discovery of ‘fairy-circles‘ in Western Australia’s Pilbara region is providing new insight into one of nature’s enduring puzzles.

The circles, which are regularly spaced patches of bare soil that form in uniform hexagonal patterns throughout arid grasslands, had until recently only been confirmed in Namibia in south-western Africa.

Brexit or Stay in the EU? – A surprise in Morley that has helped me make my mind up

Should we vote to exit or stay in the EU? A visit to the Yorkshire town of Morley taught me some lessons On Saturday 6th March 2016, I decided to check out the Brexit rally outside the Town Hall in…

Source: Brexit or Stay in the EU? – A surprise in Morley that has helped me make my mind up

Britain’s spurious leaders intend to commit UK to a dark and cold future.

From the Grauniad

The UK will enshrine in law a long-term goal of reducing its carbon emissions to zero, as called for in last year’s historic Paris climate deal.

Responding to former Labour leader Ed Miliband’s call to put the target into law, energy minister Andrea Leadsom told parliament on Monday: “The government believes that we will need to take the step of enshrining the Paris goal for net zero emissions in UK law. The question is not whether but how we do it.”

The UK is already legally bound by the Climate Change Act to reduce emissions 80% by 2050, but a law mandating a 100% cut would mark a dramatic increase in ambition. The final 20% is seen as the most difficult to cut, as it would have to come from sectors such as farming, which are not as easy to decarbonise as power plants.

The Role Of Ozone In The Earth’s Climate

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Erl Happ explains: To understand how climate evolves we have to comprehend the ‘ozonosphere’.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

In the 1920’s the inventor of the Dobson Spectrometer designed to measure ozone in the atmosphere, Gordon Dobson, quickly discovered that total column ozone maps surface pressure. Low pressure cells generated in high latitudes have fewer molecules in the atmospheric column because the upper portion is ozone rich, ozone absorbs infrared radiation from the Earth and the upper air is therefore more rarefied. The reduction in density aloft fully, and in fact over-compensates, for the coldness and density of the air at the surface. By contrast High pressure cells are dense above and relatively less dense below because they originate in the warmer ozone poor mid latitudes.

The ozone content of the air varies on all time scales.

Because the distribution of ozone is a secondary determinant of atmospheric pressure (along with the absorption of radiant energy from the sun as the primary determinant) its distribution is allied to wind…

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Pumping meltwater back on Antarctica would need 850,000 wind turbines

Antarctica [credit: Wikipedia]

Indulging in climate fantasy can lead to some strange ideas, like this one. The idea of articles like this is presumably to infect the minds of the gullible with thoughts of impending crisis, where none should exist.

With sea levels rising and Antarctica’s temperatures well below freezing, some people [i.e. the authors?] have raised the question: What would happen if we took water out of the oceans and pumped it onto the icy continent to freeze?

A group of scientists put that question to the test in a new study that explores the physical possibility and economic feasibility of geoengineering climate solutions in the future.

Logarithmic spiral beaches

Half Moon Bay State Beach, California
[credit: Wikipedia]

The Talkshop is dabbling in education today with this extract from Wikipedia.

A logarithmic spiral beach is a type of beach which develops in the direction under which it is sheltered by a headland, in an area called the shadow zone. It is characterized as a logarithmic spiral because if you look at it in plan view or aerially, it represents the same shape that is created from the logarithmic spiral relation.

These beaches are also commonly referred to as ‘half heart’ or ‘crenulate’ shaped bays, or ‘headland bays’.

Morocco to switch on first phase of world’s largest solar plant

image credit: digitaltrends

Given the enormous cost of $9 billion, the mediocre output of 580 MW when finished and the vast amount of land used, is this really worth it? Three hours after sunset it’s game over until the next day. What power source comes in then?

Morocco’s king will switch on the first phase of a concentrated solar power plant on Thursday that will become the world’s largest when completed. The power station on the edge of the Saharan desert will be the size of the country’s capital city by the time it is finished in 2018, and provide electricity for 1.1 million people, says the Guardian.

US Attorney General: ‘We may prosecute climate change deniers’.

Which climate opinions are illegal?

James Delingpole finds that there could soon be a crime called ‘climate change denial’ in the US, if authorities so determine. Wasn’t America supposed to be the land of the free?

The US Department of Justice has been considering whether people should be prosecuted for the offense of climate change denial. “This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch, responding to a question from green activist Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) at a Senate Judiciary Hearing.

Australia fires climate scientists, outsources work to Britain

Climate science under pressure here [image credit: sourceable]

Rumours of a drastic cull of climate scientists in Australia turn out to be true, as the GWPF reports.

It looks like no job is immune to outsourcing, not even climate scientist jobs in Australia. The country’s science bureaucracy is considering having all climate modeling work done in Britain after announcing the firing of some 350 employees, including 100 climate scientists.

Alex Wonhas, executive of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) told Australian lawmakers the science agency “was considering contracting some work to counterparts in the British Met Office,” The Hepburn Advocate reported Wednesday.

RSS satellite temperature update consolidates with UAH

There’s been a lot of loud rhetoric flying around about the update to the RSS satellite temperature series. What it actually amounts to is a consolidation of the satellite temperature measurement effort.

The two time series are now in good agreement and exhibit a warming rate of 0.13K/decade during the 1980-2015 period.

Astronomy picture of the day: Ceres giant cone

Ceres giant ‘cone’ and adjacent ‘crater’

Phelim Macaleer: Facebook Suspends Filmmakers Page after Campaign by Anti-fracking Activists

Deletes Court Reports Exposing Collapsing “Pollution” Case

Phelim Macaleer : Fracknation.com

FACEBOOK has removed posts and suspended the page of a journalist covering a controversial court case after a targeted campaign by anti-fracking activists.

Journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer has condemned Facebook for allowing the censorship of posts that are court reports of an important case. The attacks on the FrackNation page started as McAleer’s posts on the alleged Dimock Water Pollution trial proved popular and revealed just how weak the case is.

Dimock is the village in Pennsylvania which has been described as the “ground zero”  of fracking pollution. It has featured in documentaries such as Gasland and hundreds of other national and international media articles.

Phelim McAleer, the director of the FrackNation documentary, is the only reporter permanently covering the case and his reports on the FrackNation Facebook page, before the page was shut down, revealed there was almost no evidence to back up the allegations in the lawsuit.

EDF finance chief quits over Hinkley Point nuclear plant

Hinkley Point site [image credit: IB Times]

More pain for UK nuclear plans as the finance issue erupts again and French unions claim the reactor design is still faulty. Analogies to sinking ships and rats spring to mind.

EDF has confirmed that its finance director has quit ahead of an expected final investment decision on the £18bn Hinkley Point nuclear power plant. Thomas Piquemal stepped down because he feared the project could jeopardise EDF’s financial position, according to reports.

EDF shares opened 8.2% lower on Monday. Last month, Chris Bakken, the director of the project that could produce 7% of UK electricity by 2025, said he was leaving to pursue other opportunities.