Spain seeks to pass new climate law to reach net zero by 2050

It looks as if most European countries intend to learn the hard way that industrial economies can’t run successfully on expensive and intermittent electricity supplies. If their governments are happy to de-industrialise they should say so, then voters working in power-hungry industries would know the score. The price of climate superstition could be high for a lot of people.
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Spain has announced it is seeking to pass a new climate law to ensure it can cut its emissions to net zero by 2050, reports Energy Live News.

The draft law proposals would ban all new coal, oil and gas projects with immediate effect in order to rapidly reduce Spain’s greenhouse gas emissions by a fifth before 2030, relative to 1990 levels, as well as increase the renewable share of the country’s energy mix from around 50% to 70% by this time.

Why Phi? – resonances of exoplanets LHS 1140 b and c

Wikipedia says:
LHS 1140 is a red dwarf in the constellation of Cetus…The star is over 5 billion years old and has 15% of the mass of the Sun. LHS 1140’s rotational period is 130 days…LHS 1140 is known to have two confirmed rocky planets orbiting it, and a third candidate planet not yet confirmed.

Planet b was in the media spotlight in 2017:
LHS 1140b: Potentially Habitable Super-Earth Found Orbiting Nearby Red Dwarf – Sci-News.

“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the past decade,” said Dr. Jason Dittmann, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the Nature paper.
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“The LHS 1140 system might prove to be an even more important target for the future characterization of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1,” concluded co-authors Dr. Xavier Delfosse and Dr. Xavier Bonfils, both at the CNRS and IPAG in Grenoble, France.

Planet Of The Greens

Standard green response to criticism: ‘Shoot the messenger!’ They like to travel around the world telling people it’s a bad idea to travel around so much, due to some flaky climate theory.
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Attempts by eco-activists to censor and shut down Planet of the Humans reveals the green movement’s authoritarian nature that turns most aggressively on its own apostates.

Jeff Gibbs’ and Michael Moore’s new film, Planet of the Humans has been watched more than eight million times, says The GWPF.

It has cast doubt on the green movement’s claims to be concerned with the environment and questions the motivations and integrity of its leaders and backers.

In reply, environmental activists have attacked Moore and Gibbs, and called for their film to be censored.

Gravitricity to launch trial energy storage project in Scotland

Coal mine shaft and winding tower [image credit: Andy Dingley @ Wikipedia]

Like pumped hydro or any gravity-based system it uses more power than it stores. Euan Mearns and Roger Andrews did an interesting analysis on this idea in 2018, comparing it to batteries and hydro. One issue is finding enough suitable disused mine shafts that aren’t flooded. At least heavy weights don’t degrade over time, unlike batteries.
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The pilot project aims to demonstrate the firm’s technology, which works by using excess electricity to lift 12,000 tonnes of weights in a deep shaft and releasing them at a later time to generate energy, says Energy Live News.

The trial aims to assess the response speed of energy generation once the weights are released.

Charles Moore: Lockdown is showing us the misery that Net Zero will demand

Nairobi traffic

The problem, as climate alarmists see it, is of course that ’emissions will rebound’ when something like normal economic activity eventually resumes. The author says: “And why will economies recover? Because growth is a function of activity, and activity is made possible by energy, and globally energy remains about 85 per cent dependent on fossil fuels.” Leaving the usual conundrum for CO2 demonisers of how to strangle fossil fuel use without strangling the modern economies we rely on, and/or imposing yet more restrictions on citizens but this time using climate as the excuse.
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Eco-politics succeeds only with voters who feel guilty about being rich. Covid-19 will put paid to that, says Charles Moore via The GWPF.

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s evangelically green environment analyst, recently wrote this on his employer’s website:
“I’ve just had a light bulb moment. The feisty little wren chirping loudly in the matted ivy outside my back door is telling us something important about global climate change. That’s because, intertwined with the melodious notes of a robin, I can actually hear its song clearly. Normally, both birds are muffled by the insistent rumble of traffic, but the din has been all but extinguished in the peace of lockdown.”

Global cooling event 4,200 years ago spurred rice’s evolution, spread across Asia

Honghe Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan Province, China [image credit: Wikipedia]

A look back to an earlier era of dramatic climate change, long before anyone had time to obsess about atmospheric trace gases.
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A major global cooling event that occurred 4,200 years ago may have led to the evolution of new rice varieties and the spread of rice into both northern and southern Asia, an international team of researchers has found.

Their study, published in Nature Plants and led by the NYU Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, uses a multidisciplinary approach to reconstruct the history of rice and trace its migration throughout Asia, says Phys.org.

Rice is one of the most important crops worldwide, a staple for more than half of the global population.

It was first cultivated 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley in China and later spread across East, Southeast, and South Asia, followed by the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Assessing integrated solar roofs for EVs

Lightyear One prototype

A novel range extender, or just another way to make costly EVs even more expensive? Insurance costs could be eye-watering too.

High-tech mobility innovator Lightyear and Royal DSM will jointly scale the commercialization of Lightyear’s unique solar-powered roof for the electric vehicle market, reports Green Car Congress.

With this solution, both companies aim to accelerate the global adoption of a broad range of Electric Vehicles (EVs).

Specifically, the partnership aims to integrate solar-powered roofs in a variety of electric vehicles, including cars, vans and buses, thus enabling users to charge their vehicle directly with clean energy.

The Great Geomagnetic Storm of May 1921

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Now believed to be of similar intensity to the more famous Carrington event of 1859.

Spaceweather.com

May 12, 2020: 99 years ago this week, people around the world woke up to some unusual headlines.

“Telegraph Service Prostrated, Comet Not to Blame” — declared the Los Angeles Times on May 15, 1921. “Electrical Disturbance is ‘Worst Ever Known'” — reported the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Sunspot credited with Rail Tie-up” — deadpanned the New York Times.

They didn’t know it at the time, but those newspapers were covering the biggest solar storm of the 20th Century. Nothing quite like it has happened since.

It began on May 12, 1921 when giant sunspot AR1842, crossing the sun during the declining phase of Solar Cycle 15, began to flare. One explosion after another hurled coronal mass ejections (CMEs) directly toward Earth. For the next 3 days, CMEs rocked Earth’s magnetic field. Scientists around the world were surprised when their magnetometers suddenly went offscale, pens in strip chart recorders pegged uselessly…

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How Global Cooling Led To Widespread Droughts In The 1970s

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NOAA confirmed in 1974 that global temperatures had been falling since 1940. But during that period so-called greenhouse gases were rising, leaving climate theorists with an awkward problem. Solution: ‘adjust’ the data.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/journals/noaa/QC851U461974oct.pdf#page=5

In October 1974, the NOAA Magazine published this piece by Patrick Hughes about the detrimental effects of 30 years of global cooling (yes, the cooling that warmists insist never happened!)

http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/journals/noaa/QC851U461974oct.pdf#page=5

PDF Link:

qc851u461974oct

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Scientists explain magnetic pole’s wanderings

Magnetic North on the move [credit: ESA]

It’s down to a process known as ‘flux lobe elongation’, according to researchers. They foresee the magnetic north pole travelling a further 390–660 km towards Siberia.
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European scientists think they can now describe with confidence what’s driving the drift of the North Magnetic Pole, says BBC News.

It’s shifted in recent years away from Canada towards Siberia.

And this rapid movement has required more frequent updates to navigation systems, including those that operate the mapping functions in smartphones.

A team, led from Leeds University, says the behaviour is explained by the competition of two magnetic “blobs” on the edge of the Earth’s outer core.

Solar gravitation puzzle

Browsing twitter recently I ran across this short video of a solar flare shot a few days ago.

The largest solar feature I've seen this minimum is raining Earth-sized gobs of plasma on the surface. Shot yesterday afternoon from my backyard, about an hour of activity sped up. #astrophotography #space #opteam pic.twitter.com/Y72I37zswR

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) May 5, 2020

After asking for some clarification on frame rate I was really intrigued.

50 frames with 90 seconds between each

— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) May 6, 2020

A multilayer haze system on Saturn’s hexagon

Saturn’s hexagon

The ever-mysterious hexagon goes under the microscope, or telescope at least.

A rich variety of meteorological phenomena takes place in the extensive hydrogen atmosphere of Saturn, a world about 10 times the size of the Earth.

They help us to better understand similar features in the Earth’s atmosphere, says Phys.org.

Among Saturn’s atmospheric phenomena is the well-known “hexagon,” an amazing wave structure that surrounds the planet’s polar region.

The Why Phi Pi Slice goes camping.

The leaves of some plants grow on shoots that form 222.5 degrees round the main stem from their predecsessor

Back in 2013 I wrote a post about the relationship between our favourite number, phi (1.618…) and the famous circularity constant Pi (3.141…).

If we divide the circle of 360 degrees by phi, we get 222.5 degrees, leaving 137.5 degrees as the remainder. In that post I noted that:

The area ‘A’ of a sector of a circle is given by the simple formula: A=angle/360*Pi*R²
For a Radius ‘R’ of 1 and angle 137.507764 this is simply 137.5/360*Pi = 1.19998
The area of the whole circle is simply Pi, since R² = 1
The ratio of Pi to 1.19998 is phi²
The ratio of the smaller sector to the larger is Pi-1.19998:1.19998 which is simply phi itself.

USA Today Pushes Climate Panic

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Is there a legal limit to the more outlandish claims of climate alarmists, or if not, why not?

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

I recently described the all too often case where extreme computer modeling results feed the media into then feeding a public panic. A cascade of mindless fear. See my https://www.cfact.org/2020/04/27/tale-of-two-panics-covid-climate/.

USA Today has now provided a perfect example of promoting model based panic.

Here is their panicky title: “Unsuitable for ‘human life to flourish’: Up to 3B will live in extreme heat by 2070, study warns“

Three billion people will live where humans cannot survive? Seriously? Will they become billions of climate refugees? That is the absurd idea, right?

USA Today is a trusted source for many people, but here they publish pure nonsensical alarmist speculation as accepted fact. Note that the headline does not say “study suggests”. No it is “study warns” as though this nonsense were real and something to act on. Perhaps a ten year lockdown is called for…

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Solar-Planetary recap part one: The 11 year Schwabe cycle.

The Sun’s 11 year cycle is the most well known among many others we’ll cover in this series.

Now we’ve entered the minimum between solar cycles 24 and 25, this seems like a good moment to recap what we’ve discovered about the Sun and the planetary system that revolves around it here on the Talkshop during the last decade. The idea that the Sun’s activity cycles were somehow linked to the motion of the planets didn’t begin here of course. In fact, the idea goes all the way back to Rudolf Wolf, the Swiss astronomer who in the 1800s collated the old, and continued adding new sunspot observations. He was convinced that the orbit of Jupiter modulated sunspot numbers.

Wolf was an admirer of the work of Heinrich Schwabe, who was the first to discover an approximately decadal cyclic variation in sunspot numbers. Wolf refined and extended the observations and found that while some solar cycles were a little over ten years long, others were much closer to Jupiter’s orbital period of just under twelve years. The long term average was found to be around 11.1 years.

A proof of De Rop’s long-term lunar cycle (1799 anomalistic years)

Credit: NASA

The idea is to validate Belgian astronomer Willy de Rop’s 1971 calculations, which can be found here.

From our 2016 post discussing his paper, De Rop’s long-term lunar cycle:

De Rop’s basic premise is that there’s a correlation between the so-called ‘lunar wobble’ period and the anomalistic year.
His paper contains a geometric proof, and the final numbers are:
300 lunar wobbles in 1799 anomalistic years (the lunar wobble is known to repeat in just under 6 years).

To see what the lunar wobble is, refer to the paper. Essentially it’s when the number of lunar apsidal and nodal cycles in the period sums to 1. For more information, please refer to that post.

Study of giant viruses frozen in ice for millennia

Siberian permafrost [image credit: Julian Murton / BBC]

Since viruses – and not much else – are in the news these days, here’s a reminder that they’re nothing new. If anything they’re less scary than in the distant past, judging by this story.
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Giant viruses known as “Girus”, frozen in the permafrost from the remote landscapes of Siberia and the Antarctic are being studied by Michigan State University, reports HeritageDaily – Archaeology News.

The researchers have shed light on these enigmatic, yet captivating giant microbes and key aspects of the process by which they infect cells.

“Giant viruses are gargantuan in size and complexity,” said principal investigator Kristin Parent, associate professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at MSU.

“The giant viruses recently discovered in Siberia retained the ability to infect after 30,000 years in permafrost.”

Patagonian dust streamers resemble those on Mars

Image credit: NASA-ISS

Dust storms are common in the region, and sometimes bear resemblance to weather events on Mars, according to NASA.
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A surging dust storm and trailing dust cloud captured an astronaut’s attention as the International Space Station (ISS) was passing over South America, says NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Dust storms are common in Patagonia and familiar for people in Comodoro Rivadavia, a coastal city in southern Argentina.

The primary source of dust is Lago Colhué Huapí, a shallow lake adjacent to the much deeper Lago Musters.

Is There A Relationship Between Global Temperature And Ocean Levels? Sure, But…

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Better to follow the actual observations than the Hollywood-style scenarios of headline-chasing climate alarmists.

PA Pundits International

By Dr. Jay Lehr~

Alarms over rising oceans continue to sound. Politicians, actors, authors, and “climate activists” warn us regularly that the massive ice sheets in the Antarctic, and the Arctic, are melting. They remind us that in a matter of decades, oceans will rise to the point where they will destroy many coastal cities, and the process would become “irreversible.” The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the media have speculated and prophesied that by 2100, we would have ocean levels between five to ten feet higher.

Graphic photoshopped pictures of New York skyscrapers show buildings flooded several floors high. Miami is shown vanishing under the sea. All said to be a result of increasing CO2 followed by melting ice resulting in a rise in our ocean levels.Most of our readers suspect great exaggeration but do not understand…

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Heathrow gets permission for Supreme Court appeal over block to third runway

Heathrow airport

Coronavirus has obviously reduced the pressure on the airport for quite a while, at least. Restricting Heathrow capacity would mean some flights going somewhere else, but little likely effect on total air miles.
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The case will now be heard by the UK’s highest court as the airport tries to overturn campaigners’ earlier victory, reports Sky News.

Heathrow airport has been given permission to appeal to the Supreme Court against a block on its plan for a third runway.

Judges said Heathrow could appeal against a February ruling which said the government’s airports policy was unlawful as it failed to take into account climate change commitments.