Asia coal plants worrying for climate targets: IEA

[image credit: Pakistan Defence]

They need to find something else to worry about. Renewables are simply too feeble to take the place of coal and gas power generation, even if such were desirable, and restricting power usage is not a credible option. Quite the reverse in fact – everyone wants electricity, and more of it as time goes by.
H/T Phys.org

Coal-fired power plants operating and under construction in Asia pose a threat to achieving the goal of halting global warming, the head of the International Energy Agency told the Financial Times on Wednesday.

The Magnetic Storm of Halloween 2003

Credit: solen.info

The storm was so strong that the change in magnetic direction could be easily measured on a compass, as this 2013 article explains.

Ghosts and goblins, candle-lit jack o’lanterns and dark haunted houses, ominous screeching and maniacal laughter – these are some of the frightening fantasies we associate with Halloween.

But ten years ago during the Halloween of 2003, while children in costumes paraded door-to-door for treats, the Sun was playing its own tricks with planet Earth, says Directions Magazine.

The consequence: a solar-terrestrial nightmare became a scary reality.

The Halloween Storm

In mid-October 2003, a bundle of concentrated magnetic energy emerged from the Sun’s interior, forming a large sunspot, a site of seething activity. Enormous solar flares soon followed. Then, on October 28, the sunspot abruptly ejected a concentrated mass of electrically conducting solar wind, flinging it out into interplanetary space toward the Earth. Less than a day later, on October 29, a geomagnetic storm was initiated as the solar wind disrupted the Earth’s protective magnetosphere.

Over the next three days, the “Halloween magnetic storm” would evolve and grow to become one of the largest such storms in half a century.

Magnetic storms are global phenomena, and their effects can be easily seen around the world. During the Halloween storm, for example, magnetic direction in Alaska quickly changed by more than 20 degrees. In other words, the storm was so large that it could be measured with a simple compass.

The Halloween magnetic storm also produced spectacular aurora, with green phantom “northern lights” seen as far south as Texas and Florida.

The Impacts of this Storm

The USGS network of magnetic observatories monitored activity from the Halloween storm in collaboration with international partners. The storm played tricks on technological systems around the world, which scientists continue to analyze even today.

Continued here.

See also: The Halloween Storms: When Solar Events Spooked the Skies | GPS World

Hybrid powertrain innovations set the bar higher for the sector

Fiat 500X hybrid

Tinkering with electric and hybrid vehicle technology is one thing, but getting today’s buyers to willingly pay for it is another, as shown by weak sales despite the already widespread use of hefty subsidies.

Pan-European efforts under the ECOCHAMPS project have led to the development of five hybrid vehicles boasting reduced CO2 emissions, higher efficiency and powertrains with reduced weight and volume, says the European Commission’s CORDIS News.

The current focus on electric vehicles as the cornerstone of future urban mobility shouldn’t make us forget that their hybrid counterparts have a future too – and that this future is now. With electric vehicle range and a lack of charging infrastructure still being a problem, hybrid vehicles are likely to become the preferred solution for travelling beyond city limits, but on one condition: the development of easy to integrate, cost-efficient hybrid powertrain technology.

The ECOCHAMPS (European COmpetitiveness in Commercial Hybrid and AutoMotive PowertrainS) project was created with this requirement in mind. Since May 2015, the 25-strong consortium – which includes light- and heavy-duty vehicle manufacturers FIAT, Renault, Daimler, Iveco, MAN and DAF Trucks – has been working on solutions to improve powertrain efficiency by up to 20 %, reduce powertrain weight and volume by up to 20 % and, broadly speaking, make hybrid vehicles more cost-effective.

The results of the project, which include a modular system and standardisation framework for hybrid electric drivetrain components and auxiliaries for commercial vehicles (available on the project website), a set of electric components for hybrid powertrains, and optimised drivelines, have been demonstrated in two light-duty and three commercial vehicles at TRL 7. These vehicles are a FIAT 500X, a Renault Megane, a medium-duty commercial truck, a city bus and a heavy tractor.

Guus Arts, coordinator of the project on behalf of DAF Trucks, discusses its outcomes and importance for the future of mobility in Europe.

Continued here.

Moving the goalposts, IPCC secretly redefines ‘Climate’

Credit: planetsave.com

Half of the assessment of the Earth’s current climate is to be based on crystal ball gazing, which usually means reliance on unreliable climate models that keep showing levels of warming which fail to occur.

The IPCC appears to have secretly changed the definition of what constitutes ‘climate’ by mixing existing and non-existing data, says The GWPF.

The definition of ‘climate’ adopted by the World Meteorological Organisation is the average of a particular weather parameter over 30 years.

Powering Australia: Keeping the Lights On Means Coal-Fired Power For Generations to Come

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Australia fiddles while its own coal burns…elsewhere. That’s exactly it, but what are its apparently confused leaders thinking to allow this to happen?

STOP THESE THINGS

Australia is in the process of destroying what was the world’s most reliable and affordable power supply. The destruction is all down to heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Meanwhile, our major Asian trading partners, China and Japan are chewing up Australian coal and uranium as fast as we can ship it – and building hundreds of new plants to use our high-grade thermal coal: Full-Steam Ahead: China & Japan Snub Intermittent Wind & Solar to Build Hundreds of New-Age Coal-Fired Plants

That a country once renowned as an affordable energy superpower is throttling itself to death with a cocktail of suicidal renewable energy policies, is not just ironic, it is flat out criminal.

Tens of thousands of blue-collar jobs in mining, mineral processing and manufacturing have already been destroyed by rocketing power prices; and tens of thousands more remain under threat. Once lost, those jobs will never…

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Generating off-grid energy for industry – a critique of the UK electricity system

Drax power station [credit: drax.com]

Unpredictable supplies, increasing prices and threats of blackouts are not good news. Even allowing that the author has a related product to sell, the comments about UK electricity policies and their effects should make uncomfortable reading for its residents.

There’s no getting away from the fact that our energy infrastructure in the UK is inadequate, writes Duncan McPherson, CEO of CooperOstlund, at PEI.

The National Grid is dated, inefficient and widely considered unfit for purpose.

Demand – especially in peak times – regularly overtakes supply availability.

A New Space Weather Metric

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Hard to see a daily view there, but the multi-decadal view is worth a look.

The Next Grand Minimum

This is an interesting post at Spaceweather.com.

The daily Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI) is now on Spaceweather.com. TCI is a relatively new space weather metric that tells us how the top of Earth’s atmosphere (or “thermosphere”) is responding to solar activity. During Solar Maximum, the top of our atmosphere heats up and expands. Right now the opposite is happening. Solar Minimum conditions are in effect, and this is causing the upper atmosphere to cool off

TCI was invented by Martin Mlynczak of the Langley Research Center along with other NASA and university colleagues. For the past 17 years they have been using the SABER instrument onboard NASA’s TIMED satellite to monitor the wattage of infrared emissions from the top of the atmosphere. Recently, they realized that those measurements could be used to summarize the state of the thermosphere in a single daily index, the TCI, expressed in watts (W). Moreover…

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Engineers invent energy-saving cooling system for structures

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

A rooftop installation is needed, but low running costs are claimed.

Engineers from two American universities developed a kind of natural air conditioner with almost no consumption of electricity, reports Xinhuanet News.

The study published on Friday in the journal Joule described the innovative water-cooling system capable of providing continuous day-and-night radiative cooling for structures.

Greenland ice sheet well above average in 2018

Rinks Glacier, West Greenland
[image credit: NSIDC]

However this is interpreted, ‘sixth highest on record’ doesn’t quite support the ‘rapid melting’ story so beloved of man-made climate alarm believers. It looks a lot more like natural variability, as the report suggests.

It’s time for the Greenland ice sheet’s annual health report, brought to you by scientists from the Danish Meteorological Institute and Polar Portal.

The end of August traditionally marks the end of the melt season for the Greenland ice sheet as it shifts from mostly melting to mostly gaining snow, says ScienceNordic.

Which Planet Has the Weirdest Magnetic Field?

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In the solar system and the universe too, ‘weird’ may well be another way of saying ‘we haven’t figured it out yet’.

Planet Pailly

When I did my yearlong Mission to the Solar System series back in 2015, the planet Neptune stood out as having the weirdest and wackiest magnetic field.  Here’s a totally legit photograph from 1989 taken by the Voyager 2 space probe.  As you can see, Neptune is really confused about how magnetic fields are supposed to work.

But since 2015, science has learned more about the other three gas giants in our Solar System.  Neptune’s magnetic field is still really weird, but it’s no longer clear that it is the definitive weirdest.

• Jupiter: Based on data from the Juno mission, it looks like Jupiter has three poles instead of two.  There’s a north pole, right about where you’d expect it to be.  Then the magnetic field lines emanating from the north pole connect to two separate south poles.  The first south pole is about where you’d expect a south pole…

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Report: China cutting rare earths output

Maybe this is some kind of response to US trade tariffs, who knows? Restricting materials that are defined as ‘rare’ is obviously likely to cause problems sooner rather than later, for example in renewables and electric vehicle production.
H/T Green Car Congress

The Chinese government is limiting domestic production of rare earth elements (REEs) in the second half of the year, a move likely to crimp international exports and send prices for the critical materials soaring, according to a report from Reuters, based on information from Adamas Intelligence.

Making water from air wins couple $1.5 million XPrize

They almost missed the cut for the final competition round of five, but went on to win.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It started out modestly enough, reports AP: David Hertz, having learned that under the right conditions you really can make your own water out of thin air, put a little contraption on the roof of his office and began cranking out free bottles of H2O for anyone who wanted one.

Soon he and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, were thinking bigger — so much so that this week the couple won the $1.5 million XPrize For Water Abundance.

India Rumbles Wind Power as Fake Electricity: Output Collapses During Dead-Calm Monsoon

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STT highlights the ‘tension between economic energy and politically correct energy’.

No amount of money or technology can force the wind to blow on demand.

STOP THESE THINGS

The spinning wheel was meant to signify Indian independence, too.

It never takes them long to work out that wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. As the initiated well-know, wind power rates zero on both scores. Pointless and expensive, wind power is a kind of first world disease being spread by UN endorsed lunatics, across the developing world.

In India, solar power is seen as ‘fake electricity’, by those being forced to use it: The Cruel Hypocrisy: West Drops Wind Power as it Forces ‘Fake Electricity’ on the World’s Poor

Now, Indians have branded wind power an outright fraud, too. The calm, and very wet weather that comes with the monsoon…

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Met Office fakes the Foehn effect

Descending air in the atmosphere rises in temperature as it is adiabatically compressed in the pressure gradient created by gravity acting on atmospheric mass. This has been known for centuries. However, the MET Office has decided to do away with this fundamental fact of physics in a short video it has produced.

Here is some more information on what we mean by the Foehn Effect pic.twitter.com/h8Zr9XJ2Y2

— Met Office (@metoffice) October 23, 2018

Even their own website page on the Foehn effect (now safely screenshotted and web-cited) tells us:

“ foehn air… becomes warmer and drier on the leeside after it is compressed with descent due to the increase in pressure towards the surface.”

Faraday Grid trial could “redefine the electricity grid”

[credit: green lantern electric]

The sales pitch is that this technology “has the potential to double the amount of renewable generation a grid can carry.” But the chronic intermittency of renewables remains, so the prospect of carrying more from them is a double-edged sword in terms of grid reliability.

A new grid technology is to go on trial in London in a project that could “redefine how the electricity grid works”, reports PEI.

Scotland-based company Faraday Grid has signed a deal with British distribution network operator UK Power Networks for it to trial its potentially ground-breaking technology, also called Faraday Grid.

Ian Cameron, head of innovation at UK Power Networks, said he recognised that “Faraday’s technology has the potential to be transformational for distribution networks and the wider energy system”.

Cut Emissions? Who, Me?

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How many more years must this empty charade limp on for, before the plug is finally pulled?

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

The IPCC says we have got to start cutting emissions radically immediately, but the rest of the world is not listening!

Australia has rejected a call by scientists to phase out coal use by 2050 to prevent the world overshooting targets in the Paris Climate Change agreement with potentially disastrous consequences.
The world’s biggest coal exporter on Tuesday said it would be “irresponsible” to comply with the recommendation by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to stop using coal to generate electricity.
Canberra also reiterated its priority is to cut domestic electricity prices rather than curb greenhouse gas emissions, which have risen for four consecutive years.
“To say that it [coal] has to be phased out by 2050 is drawing a very long bow,” said Melissa Price, Australia’s environment minister, who previously worked in the mining industry.
“I just don’t know how you could say…

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Jeremy Corbyn goes to Gasland: Calls for UK fracking ban

 

UK Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn is calling for a UK wide ban on fracking. He has put out a video in a tweet, requoted (and then deleted) by one of his MPs, Chris Williamson.

As “evidence” showing how dangerous fracking is, he uses a clip from the #fakenews film ‘Gasland’ where someone ignites gas coming out with water from a kitchen sink tap. The depth of ignorance of our politicians concerning energy will collapse our electricity grid unless we vote them out and replace them with sensible people.

DT Chris Williamson MP #GTTO: RT Jeremy Corbyn: A Labour government will ban fracking immediately. pic.twitter.com/JTW1WeCghv https://t.co/UNiOxGZtiT

— Tweets MPs Delete (@deletedbyMPs) October 22, 2018

Alan Carlin: Why climate change is not an exception that justifies government intervention in free markets

Credit: planetsave.com

Accuracy in long-term climate prediction is hard to come by, from solar cycle activity onwards. Claims of imminent doom are bluffs, as is the idea of spending to ‘solve the climate’.

Climate change is nothing more nor less than a faddish scam, writes Alan Carlin. Unfortunately, this is not unusual in environmental issues.

One major problem is that there is no inexpensive way to “solve” it as climate alarmists claim. In fact, it could easily consume the entire national income of any nation that really tried to eliminate it.

Climate predictions could be wrong in UK and Europe

Topographic map of Greenland

Such predictions are usually wrong anyway, the real question being the degree of ‘wrong-ness’ compared to the actual data. The expected (by climate models) linear progression of global temperatures has fizzled out – inasmuch as it ever existed – since the ‘pause’, apart from a recent El Niño blip. Solar cycle activity is also declining compared to other recent cycles..

Current climate change predictions in the UK and parts of Europe may be inaccurate, a study conducted by researchers from the University of Lincoln, UK, and the University of Liège, Belgium, suggests.

Existing computer model simulations have failed to properly include air pressure changes that have occured in the Greenland region throughout the past 30 years, says The GWPF.

Climate and the Solar Magnetic Field

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Interesting solar predictions from Professor Zharkova.

The Next Grand Minimum

Presentation by Professor Valentina Zharkova

When: Wednesday 31st October, from 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
Where: 55 Tufton Street, Westminster, SW1P 3QL

Principal component analysis (PCA) of the solar background magnetic field observed from the Earth, revealed four pairs of dynamo waves, the pair with the highest eigen values are called principal components (PCs).

PCs are shown to be produced by magnetic dipoles in inner and outer layers of the Sun, while the second pair of waves is assumed produced by quadruple magnetic sources and so on. The PC waves produced by a magnetic dipole and their summary curve were described analytically and shown to be closely related to the average sunspot number index used for description of solar activity. Based on this correlation, the summary curve was used for the prediction of long-term solar activity on a millennial timescale.This prediction revealed the presence of a grand cycle of…

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