A Greener Future Starts With Natural Gas, World Energy Chiefs Say

Bloomberg:

By

Jonathan Gilbert

and

Jennifer A Dlouhy

16 June 2018

World energy ministers representing about two thirds of the global population tussled over how the world can achieve a cleaner energy future. The compromise answer: Natural gas, at least for now.

A consensus statement from G20 energy ministers meeting in Argentina cited the potential of natural gas “to expand significantly over the coming decades.” Meanwhile, the group said that nations that “opt to enhance their renewable energy strategies” should boost investment and financing within that arena.

An Open Letter To The Geological Society

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How much longer can the erroneous fixed ideas of IPCC-based climate science last against the forces (see signatory list) of reason and rationality?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

GWPF carry the story of a letter recently sent to the president of the Geological Society by a group of concerned current and former members:

The President
Geological Society of London

Dear President

We are writing as a group of concerned primarily geoscientists, half of whom are or were Fellows, (names and affiliations listed below). Our concern is that the Society’s position on Climate Change (aka Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW), is outdated and one-sided, and is distracting attention and funding from real issues of pollution such as plastic and other noxious industrial and domestic waste. To address this, we proposed to Colin Summerhayes that the 2010 and 2013 GSL Position Papers be posted on the Energy Matters blog, so that all sides of the discussion could be aired; and we are very grateful to Colin for effecting and taking part in this (http://euanmearns.com/the-geological-society-of-londons-statement-on-climate-change/). In…

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New study: The Sun and volcanoes caused the pause

Has the media been trying to bury bad news here? Embarrassingly bad news for its enthusiasm for supposed man-made global warming, that is.

Last week a team of researchers from the UK Met Office, the University of East Anglia, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Southern Queensland and the Sorbonne published in the journal Science Advances an interesting paper showing that the recent much debated and researched 21st century “slowdown” in global surface temperatures was real and could be explained by reduced solar activity and increased volcanic counteracting climate forcing from greenhouse gases.

It achieved almost no media coverage despite being published in a high profile journal, writes Dr David Whitehouse @ The GWPF.

Germany pours cold water over EU’s green energy ambitions

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

A few political home truths get attacked by climate obsessives, but will voters see to it that some semblance of reality takes over from unrealistic ideologically motivated targets?
H/T The GWPF

Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of “unachievable targets” on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, rejecting calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc’s energy mix by 2030.

Altmaier made the comments during an on-the-record exchange between the 28 EU energy ministers, who are gathered in Luxembourg today (11 June) for a meeting of the Energy Council.

Carbon bubble or green babble?

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

The climate propaganda/scare machine never stops, but somewhere out there is another thing called reality, which may contradict it.

Models Of Stranded Fossil Fuel Assets Cannot Be Trusted

The GWPF is today publishing a brief comment on the recent and much publicised paper in Nature Climate Change by J.-F. Mercure et al.

Dr Mercure and his colleagues offer modelled outputs to suggest that fossil fuel demand will fall sharply on the basis of current policies, and with additional policies arising from the Paris Agreement commitments they predict that the value of fossil fuel assets will collapse by 2035.

‘Super window’ could save $10 billion annually in energy costs

London’s ‘Gherkin’ [image credit: BBC]

The idea here is that a new type of triple-glazed window would be of identical width and similar weight to an equivalent double-glazed one, thus minimizing compatibility issues.

About $20 billion worth of energy leaks out of windows in the United States each winter—and that’s with double-paned insulating windows installed on a majority of buildings, says TechXplore.

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is now working with manufacturers to bring to market a “super window” that is at least twice as insulating as 99 percent of the windows for sale today and will be ready to achieve mass-market status.

The “thin triple” super window design doubles the thermal performance of current Energy Star-rated double-glazed windows and is seven times more insulating than a single-glazed window.

WSJ: The Climate-Change Tort Racket

Oil extraction [image credit: ewg.org]

The sub-heading to this is: ‘Liberal cities attempt a climate shake down of oil firms’. These cities run fuel-powered vehicles by the hundreds but still want massive compensation from oil companies. Success would likely make fuel prices rise to recover any losses.
H/T Climate Depot

San Francisco, Oakland, New York and Seattle have sued five global oil giants—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell —for billions in future damages from climate change, reports the WSJ.

Brass-knuckled plaintiff firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro has been shopping around the lawsuit to other cities desperate for cash.

Leif Svalgaard reveals his Solar Cycle 25 prediction “at last”

Solar scientist and part-time NSA operative Leif Svalgaard has produced a prediction for solar cycle 25, four years after Rick Salvador published his 86 year prediction in the swiftly censored “Pattern Recognition in Physics”.

It appears at the end of a 30 page pdf document he has published on his website. This is an interesting document, with a wealth of gayly coloured butterfly diagrams, polar field reconstructions and more. Leif self deprecatingly follows his Prediction title with (At last) not only because it comes at the end of 30 pages of preamble, but because he’s acutely aware of his method’s limitations.

Study suggests three periods of global warming slowdown since 1891 due to natural causes

If ‘slowdowns’ in global average temperatures can be natural, why not ‘speed-ups’ as well? Recent global temperature patterns correlate very poorly, if at all, with changes in the trace gas CO2 as required by IPCC-supporting climate theorists.

A team of researchers from the U.K., Sweden and Australia has found that three periods of global warming slowdown since 1891 were likely due to natural causes rather than disruptions to the factors causing global warming, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their study of global mean surface temperatures (GST) since the late 19th century and what they found.

Cheers! Trump to skip climate portion of G7 meeting

Some of the arm-wrestling will be left to the President’s aides, as he may feel he has better things to do than engage in fruitless arguments about what the weather might be like in several decades’ time.

H/T Climate Depot

(CNN) President Donald Trump plans to depart from this weekend’s Group of 7 summit in Canada several hours early, the White House announced Thursday, punctuating an explosion of acrimony between Trump and his foreign counterparts on the eve of the talks.

The White House said Trump would depart mid-morning on Saturday, skipping sessions on climate change and the environment.

An aide will take his place, the White House said.

New fuel cell off-grid power solution to challenge diesel

Gencell A5 unit [image credit: Gencell]

Diesel generators are big business in many rural areas with limited electrical power supplies and other players are looking for a slice of the action, claiming various advantages including immunity from fuel theft, as PEI reports.

A new fuel cell solution for primary power applications, launched this week, could compete on price for the first time with diesel gensets, its maker GenCell Energy says.

The Israeli firm said its hydrogen-fuelled A5 unit is designed to provide 24/7 power for off-grid and poor-grid sites and will initially be aimed at the telecom tower market.

It claims a typical telecom provider could save up to $250m across 1000 towers over ten years compared to the cost of diesel generators.

World’s first grid-scale liquid air energy storage plant goes live

Image credit: Highview Power

Is this just another way of making renewable energy even more expensive, or what? The claim is that this “is a great step forward in the creation of a truly decentralized energy system in the UK allowing end-users to balance the national electricity network at times of peak demand”. Cranking up the boilers at the power station is going out of fashion along with the power stations themselves, but the price is high due to subsidies, and security of electricity supply is uncertain.

The world’s first grid-scale liquid air energy storage plant officially launched today, reports PEI.

The 5MW/15MWh plant near Manchester in England will become the first operational demonstration of liquid air energy storage (LAES) technology at grid-scale.

Cooling Ocean Air Temps

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Despite warming due to atmospheric trace gases being a racing certainty according to the IPCC and like-minded theorists, evidence of it is getting ever harder to find.

Science Matters

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system.  Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy.  Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements.  In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.  Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST.  He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months.  This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

The May update to HadSST3 will appear later this month, but in the meantime we can look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6…

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Doubt cast on the predictive value of earthquake foreshocks

Nepal Earthquake [image credit: BBC]

Back to the drawing board for earthquake forecasting, by the sound of it.

A new study questions previous findings about the value of foreshocks as warning signs that a big earthquake is coming, instead showing them to be indistinguishable from ordinary earthquakes, reports Science Daily.

No one can predict when or where an earthquake will strike, but in 2011 scientists thought they had evidence that tiny underground tremors called foreshocks could provide important clues. If true, it suggested seismologists could one day warn people of impending temblors.

But a new study published in the online June 4 issue of Nature Geoscience by scientists at Stanford University and Bogaziçi University in Turkey has cast doubt on those earlier findings and on the predictive value of foreshocks.

UK taxpayers bankroll £15bn new nuclear power plant

Proposed new nuclear plant, Anglesey [image credit: walesonline]

They jokingly claim this will help to ‘supplement’ renewables which sometimes provide close to zero input to the electricity grid system. The reverse is much closer to the truth – renewables supplementing nearly everything else, but only when the weather and/or time of day allow it.
H/T AC Osborn

Ministers will this week reverse decades of opposition to investing taxpayer money in nuclear energy by agreeing to bankroll a £15bn-plus power station in Wales, says The Times @ the GWPF.

The government will commit to taking a direct stake in the Wylfa plant on Anglesey, planned by the Japanese industrial giant Hitachi, after more than two years of negotiations.

The Most Powerful Evidence Climate Scientists Have of Global Warming…Rules Out CO2 as the Cause

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One of the points made here is that ‘cleaner air has resulted in more visible radiation warming of the oceans, not CO2’.

The new shale tech that terrifies OPEC

Credit: mining.com

Trying to write off shale drilling as a here-today-gone-tomorrow fad isn’t working out too well, it seems. The WSJ investigates.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger says The Wall Street Journal @ the GWPF.

Two years ago, it looked like Saudi Arabia was winning its fight against the U.S. shale oil industry by furiously pumping crude to drive down prices.

Some drillers went bust and many more flirted with bankruptcy while oil drilling in places like West Texas and North Dakota collapsed.

The Saudi effort backfired.

Charles Moore: Trump has broken the spell of climate change mania

Climate crisis? [credit: BBC]

Not before time. Global temperatures haven’t been co-operating much with negative climate obsessions either.
H/T Daily Telegraph @ The GWPF.

Since Mr Trump walked out of the Paris agreement one year ago, it has been fascinating to watch the decline of media interest in “saving the planet”.

Donald Trump imposed punitive tariffs on steel imports exactly a year after he announced that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement. The two decisions are unrelated, except that both reflect the character of his presidency.

Claim: London could run out of WATER in decades thanks to climate change and population rise

Another day, another climate scare. This time it’s not enough rain, or – believe it or not – ‘climate change’ bringing the wrong kind of rain, to London as the Evening Standard reports.

Millions of extra litres of drinking water must be sourced to stop parts of London running dry over the coming decades, Thames Water has warned.

‘Mission impossible’ for US cities that want to respect Paris climate deal

Crazy world of climate finance [image credit: renewableenergyfocus.com]

They can tinker at the margins with energy policy, but giving up fuel burning altogether is not a serious option given current dependency on it as a power source. The obvious problem being that the preferred ‘renewable’ replacements are too ineffective and unreliable to deliver power on the scale needed. Wasting money on such futile policies must detract from other projects too.

When President Donald Trump announced the US exit from the Paris climate deal one year ago, the mayor of Philadelphia was among those who vowed to keep carrying the torch, says Phys.org.

“Philly is committed to upholding at (the) local level the same commitment made by the US in the Paris climate agreement,” tweeted the sixth largest US city’s mayor, Jim Kenney, a Democrat.