Republicans plan multi-billion dollar climate budget raid

US President-elect Trump [image credit: politico.com]

The winds of change following the US election are about to blow through the well-funded – up to now at least – world of climate-related bureaucracy, as CCN mournfully reports.

US Republicans are expected to axe billions of dollars in climate finance when they take the White House and Congress in January.

Funds to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of global warming and develop sustainably will be redirected to domestic priorities.

“We are going to cancel billions in payments to the UN climate change programmes and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure,” said President-elect Donald Trump in his 22 October Gettysburg address. With a Republican majority in the Senate and House of Representatives, there appears to be little standing in his way.

GWPF: UK Electricity Reform Stalls

• Dr John Constable: GWPF Energy Editor

The UK’s new secretary of state for Business, Greg Clark, has just given his first public speech on energy. It suggests, unfortunately, that he is not yet sufficiently confident of his brief to resist the views of his civil servants. Indeed, this speech could easily have been written for Ed Miliband, or Chris Huhne, or Ed Davey, and suggests that the rent-seeking green interests in the electricity sector are re-injecting themselves into the national bloodstream through an interventionist industrial strategy. This will result in overcapitalisation and reductions in productivity.

It is now a year since Amber Rudd, then Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate  (DECC) gave her “reset” speech. I was in Japan at the time, and showed the text to an impressed but disbelieving colleague from the University of Tokyo. “This is an ENERGY policy”, he said, as if anything from a British politician would obviously focus on climate change and little else besides.

Clinton ‘Trumped’: Vestas’ Shares in Freefall & Wind Industry in Full Scale Panic

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The winds of change…

STOP THESE THINGS

The election of Donald Trump has caused conniption fits amongst the hard green-left in the United States and elsewhere. Pundits predicted, with supreme confidence, that Hillary Clinton would take the White House and that all would be well in the politically correct garden.

However, America’s “basket of deplorables” had other ideas: a brash and vulgar businessmen, more famed for his line “you’re fired” on the reality TV show, The Apprentice, Trump not only won convincingly, the Republican Party increased its majority in the House and retained its majority in the Senate. Oops!

Donald Trump has made no secret of his plans to scrap a raft of “job destroying” policies invented by climate change Chicken Littles; and his hatred of these things goes back a decade to the bitter feud he has been in with a wind farm developer attempting to spear 11 turbines off the coast adjacent to his…

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Earth-bound instrument analyzes light from planets circling distant stars

Subaru telescope, Hawaii (far left) [image credit: Wikipedia]

Being able to measure things like the mass, temperature and atmospheric composition of exoplanets should generate some interesting new data for analysis, with possible implications for climate theory.

A team of scientists and engineers led by Princeton researchers recently reported the successful operation of a new instrument for the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii that will allow astronomers to make direct observations of planets orbiting nearby stars.

The instrument, dubbed CHARIS, was designed and built by a team led by N. Jeremy Kasdin, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. It allows astronomers to isolate light reflecting from planets larger than Jupiter and then analyze the light to determine details about the planets’ size, age and atmospheric constituents.

Trumped!

Nice one Josh. 🙂

Facebook won’t force its belief in renewable energy on users

Credit: Business Finance News

Well, that’s a relief 😐 But a spot of thought policing might not be too far way it seems, should Facebook attempt to judge what is or isn’t a ‘fact’ in the climate debate, as it hints it might like to do while referring to ‘denial’.

Facebook’s head of sustainability says although the company believes strongly in renewable energy, it will not be changing its algorithm to force its pro-green principles on users, reports PEI.

The company is committed to investing in renewable power but has a pragmatic approach in how it squares its principles with its daily operations.

Speaking to Power Engineering International on the fringes of the New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference in Paris, Bill Weihl, Facebook’s Director of Sustainability said that while the company doesn’t directly work with on-site renewables, it’s position is to pay for green power to offset the energy it uses.
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During a later Q&A session, Weihl did acknowledge a possibility that Facebook might change its modus operandi in a way that could benefit proponents of sustainability.

First Binary-Binary Solar System Discovered

A ‘normal’ binary system

Have fun trying to imagine how this solar system works, as iTech Post describes its unusual structure.

Astronomers have discovered the first binary-binary solar system. The discovery is said to have implications on the way people perceive the solar system was formed.

The discovered solar system has two stars as well and a planet revolving. The new binary system has been named HD 87646. It is made up of one star, a brown dwarf star, and a massive planet, according to Science Daily. The large planet is 12 times the mass of Jupiter while the brown dwarf is 57 times the mass of Jupiter. The two are in close proximity as well to the primary star.

What makes the system interesting is that it defies what people know how a solar system is. Typically astronomers think that the solar system formed out of a disk dust cloud, with the large outer planets farther out from the primary star. Yet with HD 87646 the objects are far closer than how the outer planets are in our solar system.

Watch “Snow Orbs, Houses Burried and Record Snow Early Across Russia | Mini Ice Age 2015-2035 (253)”

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Cold on its way

WeatherAction News

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What happened with Germany′s climate protection plan?

Germany will attend the COP22 climate summit in Morocco ’empty-handed’, say critics.

The whole idea of a ‘climate protection plan’, as well as sounding like some sort of insurance racket, is loaded with suspect assumptions about supposed effects of human activities on the inherent natural variation of Earth’s ocean-atmosphere system.

DW.COM reports on what’s seen by some as Germany’s Moroccan climate embarrassment, as some of its own top politicians put a spanner in the works.
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Germany’s failure to approve a national climate plan to bring to the table at the UN international climate conference has sparked a round of finger-pointing over who is responsible for the blow to the country’s green reputation.

German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks has vented her frustration over the prospect of representing her country at the talks in Marrakesh next week without any concrete measures on how it plans to meet the goal of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Jamie Foster: #Brexit Gunpowder, Treason and Plot

Reposted from the blog of Jamie Foster

Remember, remember the 4th of November, it’s the day the legal profession took leave of its senses. Hopefully temporarily but certainly noticeably. It was perhaps unsurprising. It is not often that a constitutional law case which could help define our political future appears on the front of our national newspapers with such a barrage of fireworks. It is easy to be drawn in by the pretty explosions.

The 3rd November marked a win in the High Court for a wealthy fund manager, Gina Miller. This modern-day Guy Fawkes placed her barrels of gun powder directly under the Government, rather than Parliament this time. Her explosive case determined that the Government had no right to trigger Art 50 and inform the EU of the UK’s desire to leave without a vote in Parliament. The sparks from the case caused explosions across the press, with the Mail and the Sun calling the three judges who took the decision ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people.’

Sweden Govt Impounds Turkish Ship Carrying TONNES Of Explosives, Rockets, Ammunition

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Crikey, Sheerness.

[Note: this story dates back to January 2016]

Germany’s €Trillion Euro Disaster: Wind Power ‘Transition’ Destroys its Industrial Heartland

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Massive costs, high prices, loss of industrial competitiveness and built-in unreliability – welcome to the ‘energy transition’.

STOP THESE THINGS

STT has a ‘thing’ for the English language.

In the hands of adept practitioners, our mother tongue is capable of conveying all manner of complex concepts and ideas, and doing so with verve and wit.  However, in the hands of the well-paid spin doctors and useful political idiots that run with, and run cover for, the wind industry, the English lexicon has been forced to suffer all manner of outrageous torments and abuses.

One such victim is the word “transition” and its derivatives.  Politicians of all hues appear to throw that word around with gay abandon, whenever talking about their efforts to foist a heavily subsidised wind powered ‘future’ on their hapless constituents.

As South Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity unfolds, we are repeatedly told by State and Federal politicians alike that this is all part and parcel of “transitioning” to an all renewable powered future.

However, the question…

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New theory explains how the moon got there

A key point of the new theory is that as the Moon migrated outwards from Earth, its orbit reached a critical distance where the Sun’s gravitational influence overtook that of the Earth, as Phys.org explains. Needless to say there’s more to it than that.

Earth’s Moon is an unusual object in our solar system, and now there’s a new theory to explain how it got where it is, which puts some twists on the current “giant impact” theory. The work is published Oct. 31 in the journal Nature.

The Moon is relatively big compared to the planet it orbits, and it’s made of almost the same stuff, minus some more volatile compounds that evaporated long ago. That makes it distinct from every other major object in the Solar System, said Sarah Stewart, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis and senior author on the paper.

“Every other body in the solar system has different chemistry,” she said.

If experts had been right about sea ice, there would be no polar bears in Churchill

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While BBC viewers in their TV bubble sit by the fireside grieving about the plight of those ‘poor polar bears’ (or similar emotive words)…in the real world it’s a different story altogether.

polarbearscience

The simple fact is that if polar bear experts had been right about the threat to polar bears from the loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, there would be no polar bears in Churchill this fall. No bears for tourists to photograph, none for biologists to study, and certainly none for the BBC to film for an upcoming three-part TV special called “Arctic Live.”

The low-ice future that biologists said would doom polar bears to extinction by 2050 has already happened in 8 out of the last 10 years. The sea ice future has been realized.

Polar bears have experienced those supposedly deadly low-ice summers for almost a decade but the global population did not drop by 2/3 as predicted and not a single one of the ten subpopulations predicted to be extirpated under those conditions has been wiped out.

How much more wrong can you…

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