UK funds 100MW Power-to-Gas energy storage project

Industrial Runcorn [image credit: Ineos]

We’re told Project Centurion ‘will be the largest water to hydrogen electrolyzer system in the world’. But as a percentage of the volume, how much hydrogen could safely be injected into the existing gas supply, and would it be worth the bother? This looks like the press release.

ITM Power announced funding from Innovate UK for a feasibility study to deploy a 100MW Power-to-Gas (P2G) energy storage project, “Project Centurion” at Runcorn, Cheshire, UK, reports Green Car Congress.

This project explores the electrolytic production, pipeline transmission, salt cavern storage and gas grid injection of green hydrogen at an industrial scale.

Researchers challenge our assumptions on the effects of planetary rotation

Coriolis Effect [credit: keywordhungry.com]

There are numerous attempts to explain the Coriolis effect on the internet, with varying success in terms of how confused the reader may be afterwards. This report may or may not clear things up, but best expect the latter.

The earth’s rotation causes the Coriolis effect, which deflects massive air and water flows toward the right in the Northern Hemisphere and toward the left in the Southern Hemisphere.

This phenomenon greatly impacts global wind patterns and ocean currents, and is only significant for large-scale and long-duration geophysical phenomena such as hurricanes.

The magnitude of the Coriolis effect, relative to the magnitude of inertial forces, is expressed by the Rossby number. For over 100 years, scientists have believed that the higher this number, the less likely Coriolis effect influences oceanic or atmospheric events, says Phys.org.

Federal auditors call out Germany’s failing green energy transition

German Chancellor Merkel surveys an offshore wind site [image credit: evwind.es]

Spending fortunes, having little of any benefit to show for it, and not being in control of what’s going on. That seems to be the verdict from the auditors on their government. The sums involved are eye-watering.

Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the government of a catastrophic mis-management of the green energy transition (Energiewende), reports The GWPF.

The wastage of resources is “unprecedented”. Germany’s Federal Audit Office has accused the federal government of having largely failed to manage the transformation of Germany’s energy systems.

The Chill of Solar Minimum

Credit: NOAA

Researchers have found that the last time the thermosphere was rated ‘hot’ was around 2003 (see chart below). Now with a deep solar minimum upon us, the obvious question is: what effect might this have on our planet as a whole?

Sept. 27, 2018: The sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age, says Dr. Tony Phillips at Space Weather.

Sunspots have been absent for most of 2018, and the sun’s ultraviolet output has sharply dropped. New research shows that Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding.

“We see a cooling trend,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

Tony Thomas: Ex-BHP Chief “Scrap Paris Now”

Ex-chairman of BHP (1997-99), Jerry Ellis  (right) ex-chancellor of Monash University, and an ex-director of ANZ Bank, has called for Australia to dump the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Ellis’s intervention puts cat among climate pigeons. 

The alarmists like to lie that sceptics are a fringe group. Ellis is hardly fringe. His former BHP continues to promote the story about human-caused catastrophic CO2 warming, as does Monash University. Ellis is an awkwardness for both.

By coming out against climate alarmism, Ellis, 91 81,  is giving added respectability to scepticism, much as ex-PM Tony Abbott did with his London sceptic speech of last October.[i] The credibility of the sceptic case, of course, rests not on authority figures but data such as the  more than two-fold exaggeration of warming since 1980 by the climate models on which the CO2 scare is based.

Here is Ellis’s statement on Paris.

Now at least 10 years with sea ice at 2050-like levels yet polar bears are still abundant

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With about the same minimum Arctic sea ice extent this season as 2008 and 2010, persistent claims of ‘rapid decline’ are looking more than threadbare, and polar bears don’t seem too bothered either, judging by the numbers. Climate scare merchants may have to look elsewhere to try and generate a headline.

polarbearscience

We’ve hit the seasonal Arctic sea ice minimum for this year, called this morning by US NSIDC for 19th and 23rd of Septmeber: 4.59 mkm2, the same extent as 2008 and 2010. This is not a “ho-hum” year for polar bears: it means that since 2007, they have triumphed through 10 or 11 years¹ with summer ice coverage below 5.0 mkm2 —  levels that in 2007were expected to cause catastrophic declines in numbers.

Summer sea ice below 5.0 mkm2 were not expected to occur until about 2050, according to 2005/2006 sea ice models and polar bear specialists at the US Geological Survey (USGS). Polar bear survival models predicted 2/3 of the world’s polar bears would disappear when ice levels reached this threshold for 8 out of 10 years (Amstrup et al. 2007, 2008; Hunter 2007) but polar bears have been more resilientthan expected (Crockford 2017, 2018; Crockford…

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Germany struggles to end coal power as populist AfD challenges green consensus

Hambach surface mine, Germany [image credit: Wikipedia]

To be more realistic, delete ‘struggles’ and insert ‘fails totally’. The bottom line is that part-time unpredictable electricity supplies are of strictly limited use to modern industrial economies dependent on continuous and adequate – preferably affordable – power for their survival and prosperity. Granted, lignite is not a great choice of fuel but something has to be used to keep the show on the road 24/7.

Coal showdown reflects government’s floundering shift to renewable power, says The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

Not far from Germany’s Rhine River, a fight to thwart giant excavators from grinding away what’s left of the 1,200-year-old Hambach forest came to a head this month as thousands of protesters faced off with police in a tense, and at times violent, showdown.

Three jailed over Cuadrilla fracking protest

A reminder that exceeding the permitted limits of protesting can have negative consequences for the protesters themselves as well.

Three protesters have been jailed for a causing a public nuisance after they climbed on to lorries outside a fracking site, reports Energy Voice.

The disruption at energy firm Cuadrilla’s base in Preston New Road in Little Plumpton, Lancashire, in July 2017 lasted just short of 100 hours as the campaigners refused to come down.

Growing pressure for Clexit and Brexit

Growing Pressure for Clexit – (even from France)
And it’s Time to Defund all UN Climate bodies
Viv Forbes 25 September 2018 

President Trump has extinguished all hopes that USA will join the Paris Climate Agreement. Since then, other countries are heading towards the Climate Exit. An increasing number of prominent people are joining the campaign to counter the falsehood that man-made CO2 emissions drive global climates, and to expose the threat that UN agencies will take control of every aspect of our lives. The list of dissidents includes:

Corbyn: I’ll create 400,000 green jobs (and destroy a million real ones)

In Spain, every ‘green job’ created led to the loss of 2.2 others in the real economy.

Meanwhile one of Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs, Laura Smith, the Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich, has called for a general strike to help bring down the Conservative government – if there isn’t a general election.

She spoke at The World Transformed festival, which is running alongside the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

BBC climate change ‘facts’ are fiction

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

‘Move along please, nothing to see here, science is settled’. Is that the BBC’s climate reporting policy? Does controversy have to be swept under the carpet, for fear of upsetting the ‘greenblob’? What happened to their charter duty of impartiality?

H/T The GWPF

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change, writes Harry Wilkinson.

This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these ones aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

Dust storms on Titan spotted for the first time

Saharan dust storm [image credit: BBC]

The researchers report that ‘Titan displays particularly energetic meteorology at equinox in equatorial regions’. Associated strong winds ‘are expected to occur in downbursts during rare equinoctial methane storms—consistent with the timing of the observed brightenings’. On Earth, auroral activity is strongest at the equinoxes, so solar wind strength could be a factor in both phenomena.

Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has revealed what appear to be giant dust storms in equatorial regions of Saturn’s moon Titan, reports Phys.org.

The discovery, described in a paper published on Sept. 24 in Nature Geoscience, makes Titan the third Solar System body, in addition to Earth and Mars, where dust storms have been observed.

Cambridge University scientists create ancient tree ring diary

Did the BBC just say in this report: ‘if the recent warming is unusual’? Whether tree ring analysis can improve predictions, as suggested, is an interesting question but open to debate.

The “longest, continuous tree ring-based diary” is being created by scientists at the University of Cambridge to help map climate change, reports BBC News.

The diary documents climatic conditions going back centuries, using trees from across the world.

Climate alarmists accuse IPCC of ‘watering down’ disaster predictions (again)

Credit: planetsave.com

Déjà vu – another amusing outbreak of paranoia from the ranks of overheating climate obsessives who think the weather depends on how much fuel is burnt, or something.

Climate alarmists are alarmed that a new IPCC report to be released on 8 October by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will reject their apocalyptic rhetoric and disaster predictions, says The GWPF.

They blame IPCC scientists for deliberately downplaying the danger of global warming in order to placate the Trump Administration and some of its fossil fuel allies.

Time To Pull The Plug On Electric Vehicle Handouts For The Rich

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How long does an introductory incentive period for EVs have to go on for? The hefty subsidies have to come out of finite state budgets.

PA Pundits International

By Nicolas Loris and David Grogan ~

Earlier this year, Congress passed an irresponsible budget bill that included handouts for electric vehicle owners and alternative fuels.

Eager to frivolously waste more taxpayer dollars, some legislators are now pushing to extend the electric vehicle tax credit and lift the cap on the number of vehicles that qualify for the credit by each manufacturer.

In 2014, 79 percent of electric vehicle tax credits went to households making over $100,000. (Photo: nrqemi/Getty Images)

Doing so would reward special interests and only benefit the wealthiest Americans. Congress should instead eliminate the subsidies for electric vehicles.

Promoted as a way to wean Americans off their alleged addiction to oil, both federal and state governments have generous handouts for electric vehicles. Consumers can use up to $7,500 of other peoples’ money to buy an electric vehicle.

Add in-state and local incentives and that number can easily top…

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Cuadrilla to start fracking in England in weeks

UK fracking regulation – a very slow process

It’s been a long time with many obstacles to overcome, but UK fracking seems finally to be close to the start line.

H/T The GWPF

LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters) – Shale gas developer Cuadrilla will start fracking at its Preston New Road site in northwest England in the next few weeks, it said on Wednesday as it announced government approval for a second well.

Hydraulically fracturing, or fracking, involves extracting gas from rocks by breaking them up with water and chemicals at high pressure and was halted in Britain seven years ago after causing earth tremors.

Report slams ‘high flying’ UN environment chief

Another case of ‘do as we say, not as we do’ as UN globe-trotting by fuel-powered machines takes precedence over its claims that there’s a serious problem with man-made carbon dioxide emissions. Not so serious that they can’t ignore it whenever it suits them to do so, which seems to be most of the time judging by this report.

The head of the UN body that leads on sustainability and green issues has been criticised for extensive and expensive air travel, reports BBC News.

A draft internal audit, obtained by the Guardian and seen by the BBC, says that Erik Solheim’s actions risked the reputation of UN Environment.

The report says he incurred costs of $488,518 (£373,557) while travelling for 529 out of 668 days.

There was “no oversight or accountability” to monitor this travel.

End of the road for solar panels on roadways?

Solar panel road [image credit: Wattway]

For several obvious reasons cited below, the conclusion should be that solar panels on road surfaces perform extremely poorly and are essentially an irrelevant waste of money. If the money has to be spent, putting the same amount of panels somewhere more suitable would be an easy improvement to make.
H/T Phys.org

Four years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels, says Dylan Ryan at The Conversation.

The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.

Astrophysicists measure precise rotation pattern of sun-like stars for the first time

Artist’s impression of an exoplanetary system [credit: NASA]

…and don’t get the answers their models led them to expect. Could the close proximity to their star of most exoplanets so far observed be a factor?

Sun-like stars rotate up to two and a half times faster at the equator than at higher latitudes, a finding by researchers at NYU Abu Dhabi that challenges current science on how stars rotate, reports Phys.org.

Until now, little was known about the precise rotational patterns of Sun-like stars, only that the equator spins faster than at higher latitudes, similar to the Sun.

Hurricane Florence–The Myths and The Facts

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The blog post title speaks for itself. Alarmists can’t accept natural variation, so use false logic to try and claim that any weather characteristic which wasn’t exactly like the last few hurricanes must be somehow man-made.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://abcnews.go.com/US/million-people-evacuated-coast-hurricane-florence-bears/story?id=57740845

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-storm-florence/mass-evacuations-ordered-as-hurricane-florence-heads-toward-carolinas-idUSKCN1LR0J6

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45517260

http://time.com/5397241/florence-breaks-rainfall-records-in-north-carolina/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-real-welcome-to-the-new-normal/2018/09/17/2ded61e4-bab3-11e8-a8aa-860695e7f3fc_story.html?utm_term=.21f11175fc15

True to form, the media have been whipping up a state of hysteria about Hurricane Florence. Unlike some of their more irresponsible members, I have waited until all of the data is in, instead of rushing to judgment.

So, to the facts:

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