‘End of the road’ for UK citizens’ climate case rejected by appeal court

Case dismissed

Another attempt to get judges to override Government policy in the name of disputed climate theories falls by the wayside.

The case, brought by 11 members of the public and the NGO Plan B argued the UK’s 2050 climate target was not in line with the Paris Agreement, reports Climate Home News.
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A UK citizens’ lawsuit over the government’s 2050 climate target hit “the end of the road” this week after an appeals court refused to hear the case, the climate legal group Plan B announced.

Carbon Tax Ignorance

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The ongoing civil unrest of the ‘Yellow Vests’ in France was triggered by a carbon tax proposal. Resistance to an unnecessary new tax isn’t surprising.

PA Pundits International

By Craig Rucker ~

There’s a new push on to institute a carbon tax in America.

This is folly.  Bi-partisan folly.

The carbon tax folks have compiled a large list of economists and past public office-holders in support, with some pretty impressive names on board.    The names include such heavy-hitters as Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Janet Yellen, George Shultz, Lawrence Summers and many more.

Two Florida Congressmen, Democrat Ted Deutch and Republican Francis Rooney, announced they are planning to introduce a carbon tax bill with the money raised paid out as “rebates” to individuals.

Never has so much brain power been so wrong.

As Mark Mathis posted at CFACT.org:

The idea of a tax on carbon is that it will cause people to use smaller amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal while driving innovation in the energy sector. But there’s a big problem with this kind of…

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Extreme rainfall events are connected across the world

We’re told there are patterns which ‘appear to be created by Rossby waves – wiggles in fast-flowing currents of air high in the atmosphere, known as the jet streams.’

An analysis of satellite data has revealed global patterns of extreme rainfall, which could lead to better forecasts and more accurate climate models, reports Phys.org.

Extreme rainfall—defined as the top five percent of rainy days—often forms a pattern at the local level, for example tracking across Europe.

But new research, published today in Nature, reveals that there are also larger-scale global patterns to extreme rainfall events.

Digital tech is changing the oil exploration game

Oil in Alaska [image credit: businessinsider.com]

The oil industry is not about to go away and die quietly, contrary to the wishes of climate alarmists – far from it.

A new exploration technique has uncovered a deposit containing more than 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil in Alaska’s North Slope, reports OilPrice.com.

Digital technology adoption in all stages of upstream operations in the oil and gas industry has seen a steep rise recently.

While a lot has been written about the benefits of digitizing various aspects of the well-drilling, extraction, and field maintenance processes, there is also another major field where digital tech is changing the game: before the well-drilling even begins.

Science Says: Get used to polar vortex outbreaks

Polar vortex [image credit: NASA]

H/T Phys.org
Changing polar vortex patterns and wavy jetstreams – do they suggest solar magnetic changes as sunspots decline, or another 0.01% of trace gases in the atmosphere, or something else? Much scientific head-scratching, although research has been going on for a while.

It might seem counterintuitive, but the dreaded polar vortex is bringing its icy grip to parts of the U.S. thanks to a sudden blast of warm air in the Arctic, writes Seth Borenstein.

Get used to it. The polar vortex has been wandering more often in recent years.

Reality Check: Heatwave Blackout Gives Victorians Taste of the ‘Transition’ to Wind & Solar

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No fun being the crash test dummies of over-reliance on intermittent ruinables.

STOP THESE THINGS

The dreamers who think they’ll soon be running entirely on sunshine and breezes, have just been smacked with reality, in Victoria, at least.

There’s something poetic about watching infants being forced to grow up. And, so it is, with once loyal RE zealots, being forced to rethink their love affair, after their taste of what it’s like swelter in Melbourne, without the benefit of that first world necessity, electricity.

Over the last couple of posts, STT has focused on the chaos that reigned in South Australia and Victoria on a couple of hot days – coupled with wind power output collapses (see above) that resulted in hundreds of thousands being deprived of power, 200,000 in Victoria, alone – and the price of power going through the roof.

Watching the panic spread was, somewhat, amusing. Nothing like watching those who thought they understood the electricity system left floundering and struggling for…

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Irish carbon tax rise in doubt following Yellow Vest revolt in France

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

It’s Ireland’s turn to find ways of sucking the life out of its economy to appease the climate alarm lobby.
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Irish MPs and senators are split over plans for a fourfold increase in carbon tax to put Ireland on course to meet its 2030 climate change targets, following the yellow vest protests in France, says The Times.

Fine Gael and Green Party members of the Oireachtas climate action committee want a report next month to recommend a carbon tax of at least €80 a ton over the next decade, which would add €12 to the cost of filling a car with diesel or petrol and €7.20 to a bag of coal.

Germans at loggerheads over Autobahn speed limits

It’s claimed that ‘new speed limits would lower Germany’s carbon dioxide emission level by less than 0.5 percent’, reports DW.com. Limits already apply in some places, but climate propaganda has turned ’emissions’ into a political issue.

A majority of Germans approve of imposing a maximum speed limit on the country’s Autobahns, a survey published at the weekend indicated.

Fifty-two percent of those polled agreed that speeds of between 120 and 140 kilometers per hour (kph) (75 to 87 miles per hour) would be appropriate to help tackle climate change, according to the Emnid Institute survey, published by the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Forty-six percent opposed such limits.

Claim: compressed air in underground rocks could be the next batteries

Scottish offshore wind project [image credit : urbanrealm.com]

The very fact that these kinds of idea are being put forward is another admission that renewables are chronically intermittent and unreliable as electricity generators. We’re told ‘considerable investment’ would be needed but they ignore the fact that, for less cost and complexity, some reliable new gas power stations would be a far more practical plan.

By pumping compressed air into porous rocks deep under the sea floor, scientists think we could effectively store energy for months at a time, says Discover magazine.

With reports about climate change becoming increasingly dire, it’s increasingly important to find an eco-friendly way to not only generate energy, but also store it.

After all, wind turbines and solar power and the like don’t run steadily. So we can’t just stick that extra energy in a bottle to use when the wind dies down and the sun sets.

The UN’s Global Green Law is going nowhere for now

It may have taken a knock, but it’s by no means the last we’ll hear of it, as CFACT explains.

The first major meeting of the UN’s (take a breath) “Ad hoc Open-ended Working Group towards a Global Pact for the Environment” or simply OEWG, convened on Monday, 14 January 2019 at the United Nations Environment Program offices in Nairobi, Kenya.

During the week-long session, delegates considered the report of the United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG), titled “Gaps in international environmental law and environment-related instruments: towards a global pact for the environment.”

This is the newly hatched grand green dream, for a binding set of new global laws that both encompasses and surpasses all of the existing multinational environmental treaties and agreements (MEAs). I am not making this up.

Latest buzz in Arctic tourism is a floating city

Arctic Ocean

Sounds like a cruise ship that doesn’t go anywhere.

Developers in Singapore intend to ship thousands of Asians to a tourism machine in Arctic waters, reports the Barents Observer.

«People want to visit new places and experience something different,» says Aziz Merchant. He is Executive Director of the Keppel Offshore & Marine Technology Centre, a unit under the powerful Keppel Group, and participated in this week’s Arctic Frontiers in Tromsø, Norway.

«From the Asian perspective, tourists want new challenges, they want to explore areas that has not been explored before. Like with space tourism,» Merchant said in an address delivered at the conference.

‘Gore Effect’ Trips Up Green Elites Talking Climate In Davos

Credit: foreca.com

Davos is a balmy -25C this morning – just right for sounding off about a theoretical future excess of warm weather. 😎

More than just a portmanteau, ‘Snowmageddon’ has forced the green elite to miss their own party in Davos Monday, putting their faux climate concern on hold, says Climate Change Dispatch.

Who would have thought it: Snow in Davos! It’s only Europe’s highest town.

Nitrogen oxide: Is it really that dangerous, lung doctors ask?

Here we’re quoting the most relevant part of a longer article discussing this issue, also including particulates. Has the German public and the world been fed a scare story that gives diesels an unfair image, to some extent at least?

Several German pulmonary physicians question the current nitrogen oxide and particulate matter limits, says DW.com.

These are inadequate and mainly based on questionable epidemiological studies, they say.
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Many victims of smoking, but where are the NOx deaths?

Claim: Record snow ‘likely a consequence of global warming’

Alps weather: Heavy snow cuts off ski resorts
[image credit: BBC News]

‘Here we go again’ says Climate Depot. ‘Climate activists are once again claiming that *global warming* is causing record-breaking snow.’ Forgetting perhaps that it has to be cold to snow, otherwise moisture falls as rain. Also forgetting their earlier claims that Alpine snow would tend to disappear for exactly the reason that is now supposed to make it worse.  

UK Guardian By Kate Ravilious
Excerpt: Look at all that snow in the Alps; has global warming taken a break?

Alas, no, it turns out that the recent record-breaking dumps of snow across much of southern Germany, Switzerland and Austria are more likely a consequence of global warming.

New ocean warming paper contains “factual errors and misleading statements”

Is the desire to promote climate alarm leading researchers to make mistakes?

Second ocean paper in three months is refuted by independent climate scientist Nicholas Lewis, reports The GWPF.
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A scientific paper, published in Science magazine last week, led to widespread claims that the oceans were warming faster than previously thought, and received media attention around the world.  

But less than a week after the headlines, an independent scientist, Nicholas Lewis, has found that a team led by Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, had made what he calls important factual errors.

Scotland: ‘ancient’ stone circle turns out to be from the 1990s

Easter Aquhorthies recumbent stone circle (genuine) in north-east Scotland [image credit: Wikipedia]

As a local official commented: “These types of monument are notoriously difficult to date.” And fakes can be difficult to spot, it seems.

Archaeologists in Scotland were disappointed to discover a stone circle they believed was centuries old only dates back to the 1990s, reports Newsweek.

Researchers descended on the monument in Leochel-Cushnie, Aberdeenshire, in Scotland, when the current landowner reported the site to authorities.

Archaeologists heralded the site as authentic, adding it to the list of “recumbent stone circles”—a rare type of circle found in the local area.

Climate Hysterics Skyrocket Even As Weather Disasters Haven’t

Increasingly absurd disaster rhetoric is consistently contradicted by climate and weather data and backed up by little more than obstinate assertions, says Paul Driessen at Climate Change Dispatch.
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Call it climate one-upmanship. It seems everyone has to outdo previous climate chaos rhetoric.

The “climate crisis” is the “existential threat of our time,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her House colleagues. We must “end the inaction and denial of science that threatens the planet and the future.”

Former California Governor Jerry Brown solemnly intoned that America has “an enemy, though different, but perhaps very much devastating in a similar way” as the Nazis in World War II.

Not to be outdone, two PhDs writing in Psychology Today declared that “the human race faces extinction” if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.

Researchers find cooling effect of aerosols in cumulus and MSC clouds twice as high as thought

Another possible factor to consider in the climate cause and effect puzzle.

An international team of researchers has found evidence that suggests the cooling effect of aerosols in cumulus and MSC clouds is twice as high as thought, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their analyses of data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) database and what they found.

Global warming is very much in the news of late, as the planet continues to heat up. But one of the factors at play is very seldom mentioned—the role of clouds in cooling the planet.

They do so by reflecting heat from the sun back into space. But how much of the reflecting occurs due to water in the clouds and how much is due to aerosols?

Waves in Saturn’s rings give precise measurement of planet’s rotation rate

Saturn from the Cassini orbiter [image credit: NASA]

This has been a tricky problem for years as explained below, and now appears to have been resolved. But whether that’s the end of the story remains to be seen.

Saturn’s distinctive rings were observed in unprecedented detail by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and scientists have now used those observations to probe the interior of the giant planet and obtain the first precise determination of its rotation rate, reports Phys.org.

The length of a day on Saturn, according to their calculations, is 10 hours 33 minutes and 38 seconds.

Solar Climate Connection and Cosmic Rays

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A look at possible implications of current and continuing low solar activity.

The Next Grand Minimum

The is a very interesting 40-minute video presentation by Nir Shaviv on the solar-climate connection and cosmic rays.

Shaviv first presents the evidence that the sun affects climate before explaining the cosmic ray ideas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9gjU1T4XL4

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