Multiple Big Bang theory could bring ‘Copernican revolution’ says Astronomer Royal

credit: NASA

Roll up, roll up – more Big Bangs for your buck here.
H/T Daily Telegraph 

‘We have reason for thinking the Universe we observe goes on much further, almost certainly one thousand times further and maybe so much further that all cosmological options are repeated’ – Lord Rees
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There may have been more than one Big Bang, the Astronomer Royal has said and claims the world could be on the brink of a revolution as profound as Copernicus discovering the Earth revolved around the Sun.

Why a perfect storm awaits UK power

Image credit: BBC / PA

The storm clouds are gathering over UK electricity generating capacity. The government seems paralysed by the absurd belief it can ‘save the climate’, or something.
H/T PEI

Urgent government intervention is required to ensure that current uncertainty in the UK market is replaced by developer confidence, writes Paul Webber.

Secret tape sheds light on Australian climate science job losses

Australian coral [image credit: heraldsun.com.au]

The row over proposed admin changes in Australian climate science rumbles on, amid reports of ‘walkouts, groans and the occasional expletive’ at a staff meeting.

Remarks made by the head of Australia’s peak science body in a secret recording will do little to assuage fears the country will lose much of its climate science capacity amid severe budget cuts.

Dying from heat and cold: which extreme is the more deadly?

Hot or cold[Image credit: BBC]

Climate catastrophists should be careful what they wish for, according to this review featured by CO2 Science.

In a review of the human health effects of temperature, Seltenrich (2015) writes that “while isolated heat waves pose a major health risk and grab headlines when they occur, recent research has uncovered a more complex and perhaps unexpected relationship between temperature and public health,” which is, as he continues, that “on the whole, far more deaths occur in cold weather than in hot.”

BBC in transparency row over refusal of a third of all FOI requests

‘Auntie’ knows best – or likes to pretend it does.

The BBC has been plunged into a transparency row after data revealed it refuses to answer more than a third of the Freedom of Information requests it receives by relying on a specialised excuse, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

The public service broadcaster, which charges households a £145.50 licence fee every year, has been criticised after data showed it failed to fully respond to 3,110 requests out of a possible 9,076 between September 2011 and March this year.

Households could be charged annual ‘insurance premium’ for access to electricity grid

Image credit: geograph.org.uk

H/T Daily Telegraph

‘If the very affluent all had solar panels and batteries and were paying relatively low bills, and the relatively less well-off were paying higher bills because they were subsidising the grid, I don’t think society would accept that’
Dermot Nolan – UK’s chief energy regulator

Every UK household could have to pay an annual “insurance premium” for access to the UK electricity grid, under plans to overhaul the way networks are paid for.

New Hinkley Point doubts as unions plan opposition

credit: IB Times

This non-project (so far) must hold some sort of record for delays, doubts, cost increases and basic feasibility. PEI reports on the latest negative news.

The beleaguered Hinkley Point C project in western England is set to suffer another setback, with the unions involved in EDF reinforcing their opposition to the nuclear power plant project going ahead.

Donald Trump Formal Policy Address on Energy

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And there’s more:

Donald Trump: I’ll cancel Paris climate agreement and stop all payments to UN fund to mitigate effects of climate change worldwide
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/27/donald-trump-ill-cancel-paris-climate-agreement-and-stop-all-pay/

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Stewgreen

https://youtu.be/9I8soRz1cAA?t=4865

Donald Trump spoke to thousands at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, North Dakota yesterday after clinching the GOP nomination for President of the United States.

Whatever else you think about him, he talked a lot of sense when it came to energy policy.

From The 4President.us blog:

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CERN: Pre-industrial skies cloudier than previously thought

 

Credit: CERN

CLOUD experiment at CERN shows that the skies were much cloudier before the industrial revolution than previously thought.

Stonehenge transport mystery solved?

Stonehenge [image credit: BBC]

Whether this is ‘case closed’ is uncertain but it does seem to offer another option to resolve the puzzle, as the Telegraph explains.

It is an archaeological conundrum that has baffled generations of experts. Just how did prehistoric Britons manage to transport the huge bluestones of Stonehenge some 140 miles from the Preseli Mountains in Wales to their final home on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire?

The answer is surprisingly simple. The feat really isn’t as hard as everyone imagined.

Researchers in Antarctic discover new facets of space weather

Aurora over Antarctica [image credit: spacefellowship.com]

ScienceDaily reports on the latest advances in understanding how the solar wind interacts with Earth. Note the seasonal aspects and the electric current findings.

A team of National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported researchers at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) discovered new evidence about how Earth’s magnetic field interacts with solar wind, almost as soon as they finished installing six data-collection stations across East Antarctic Plateau last January.

Their findings could have significant effects on our understanding of space weather. Although invisible to the naked eye, space weather can have serious, detrimental effects on modern technological infrastructure, including telecommunications, navigation, and electrical power systems.

The researchers for the first time observed that regardless of the hemisphere or the season, the polar ionosphere is subject to a constant electrical current, produced by pressure changes in the solar wind.

Fracking gets planning permission

Councillors have given Third Energy permission to test frack in Kirby Misperton.

NASA-led study looks at sea ice differences at Earth’s poles

Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum extent while the Arctic reached a minimum extent in the ten lowest since satellite records began. Why are these trends going in opposite directions?
Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng

It’s hard not to suspect a politicized element to the results of such a study due to the NASA/NOAA factor. They say Antarctic sea ice has increased ‘just slightly’ since the 1970s but some might put it stronger than that.

Why has the sea ice cover surrounding Antarctica been increasing slightly, in sharp contrast to the drastic loss of sea ice occurring in the Arctic Ocean? A new NASA-led study finds the geology of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are responsible.

Ken Gregory: The Economic Impact of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Energy Balance Climate Sensitivity

The most important parameter in determining the economic impact of climate change is the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions. Climatologist Nicholas Lewis used an energy balance method to estimate the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) best estimate at 1.45 °C from a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere with a likely range [17 – 83% confidence] of 1.2 to 1.8 °C. ECS is the global temperature change resulting from a doubling of CO₂ after allowing the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium, which takes about 3000 years.

A more policy-relevant parameter is the Transient Climate Response (TCR) which is the global temperature change at the time of the CO₂ doubling. A doubling of CO₂ at the current growth rate of 0.55%/year would take 126 years. The analysis gives the TCR best estimate at 1.21 °C with a likely range [17 – 83%] of 1.05 to 1.45 °C.

The two periods used for the analysis were 1859-1882 and 1995-2011. They were chosen to give the longest early and late periods free of significant volcanic activity, which provide the largest change in forcing and hence the narrowest uncertainty ranges. The long time between these periods has the effect of averaging out the effect of short-term ocean oscillations such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), but it does not account for millennium scale ocean oscillations or indirect solar influences.

Ian Plimer: Not For The Greens

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Looks like we’ll be stuck in an age of un-enlightenment at least until the planet cools down a bit.
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Tim Cullen puts us in the picture.

MalagaBay

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, in the Green Corner, the caped crusaders fighting for climate justice and A New American Dark Age.

In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools.

“It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”

The resolution passed Tuesday evening calls for the school district to get rid of textbooks or other materials that cast doubt on whether climate change is occurring and that the activity of human beings is responsible. The resolution also directs the superintendent and…

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The World’s Largest Solar Plant Just Torched Itself

From Gizmodo. H/T Richard Cowley

Misaligned mirrors are being blamed for a fire that broke out yesterday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the high-tech facility crippled for the time being. It sounds like the plant’s workers suffered through a real hellscape, too.

Damaged steam ducts and water pipes. (Image: San Bernardino County Fire Department via AP)

A small fire was reported yesterday morning at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) in California, forcing a temporary shutdown of the facility. It’s now running at a third of its capacity (a second tower is down due to scheduled maintenance), and it’s not immediately clear when the damaged tower will restart. It’s also unclear how the incident will impact California’s electricity supply.

U.S. Republicans launch free-speech probe into prosecutors targeting climate sceptics

credit: paper-bird.net

The push back against US climate bullies gathers pace. If attempts to use the courts to impose climate dogma keep being resisted like this, maybe the whole idea will get dropped. — H/T GWPF

[From: Valerie Richardson – The Washington Times]
House Republicans launched Wednesday an investigation into the 17 attorneys general pursuing fraud allegations against climate change skeptics, citing concerns about the campaign’s impact on free speech and scientific inquiry.

“Americans are entitled to express their views on matters of science and public policy even if certain groups disagree,” said a statement from the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Climate Modelling Dominates Climate Science

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Therein lies the problem – or one of them. How’s that cloud modelling going for instance?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://www.cato.org/blog/climate-modeling-dominates-climate-science

An interesting study from Pat Michaels and David Wojick:

Computer modeling plays an important role in all of the sciences, but there can be too much of a good thing. A simple semantic analysis indicates that climate science has become dominated by modeling. This is a bad thing.

What we did

We found two pairs of surprising statistics. To do this we first searched the entire literature of science for the last ten years, using Google Scholar, looking for modeling. There are roughly 900,000 peer reviewed journal articles that use at least one of the words model, modeled or modeling. This shows that there is indeed a widespread use of models in science. No surprise in this.

However, when we filter these results to only include items that also use the term climate change, something strange happens. The number of articles is only reduced to roughly…

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NASA mini-balloon mission gets a magnetic surprise

Near Earth’s magnetic poles, some of Earth’s magnetic field – shown as red in this diagram – loops out into space and connects back to Earth. But some of Earth’s polar magnetic field connects directly to the sun’s magnetic field, shown here in white. [credit: NASA]

Earth’s magnetic field is more dynamic than expected, as Phys.org reports. Old-fashioned observation gets a result.

During the Antarctic summer of 2013-2014, a team of researchers released a series of translucent scientific balloons, one by one.

The miniature membranous balloons – part of the Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses, or BARREL, campaign – floated above the icy terrain for several weeks each, diligently documenting the rain of electrons falling into the atmosphere from Earth’s magnetic field.

Then in January 2014, BARREL’s observations saw something never seen before.

Trump calls for renegotiation of Paris climate deal

Climate crisis? [credit: BBC]

Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth in climate alarm circles, and double it if Trump becomes US president. The Hill reports on the latest US election controversy.

Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would look to renegotiate the landmark United Nations climate change deal if he’s elected president this year. 

The deal, reached in Paris in December and signed by the United States last month, treats the U.S. unfairly compared to other countries, he told Reuters in a wide-ranging interview.