Use of forests to offset carbon emissions – not as easy as it may seem

Credit: klimatetochskogen.nu

They may be chasing their own tails here. The carbon cycle is a natural process, but now climate-obsessed humans assume they can achieve something by attempting to tinker with it. But they also promote so-called ‘carbon capture and storage’, which in the unlikely event it was successful would reduce growth rates of CO2-dependent trees and other vegetation.
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Given the tremendous ability of forests to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, some governments are counting on planted forests as offsets for greenhouse gas emissions—a sort of climate investment, says Phys.org.

But as with any investment, it’s important to understand the risks.

If a forest goes bust, researchers say, much of that stored carbon could go up in smoke.

Proposed NASA mission would visit Neptune’s curious moon Triton

The orbit of Triton (red) is opposite in direction and tilted −23° compared to a typical moon’s orbit (green) in the plane of Neptune’s equator [image credit: Wikipedia]

Triton orbits the ‘wrong’ way round Neptune, is far larger than all the other Neptunian moons, and has a high tilt angle, among other peculiar traits. In short, it has some explaining to do.
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When NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Neptune’s strange moon Triton three decades ago, it wrote a planetary science cliffhanger, says Technology.org.

Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft ever to have flown past Neptune, and it left a lot of unanswered questions.

The views were as stunning as they were puzzling, revealing massive, dark plumes of icy material spraying out from Triton‘s surface. But how?

Images showed that the icy landscape was young and had been resurfaced over and over with fresh material. But what material, and from where?

How could an ancient moon six times farther from the Sun than Jupiter still be active? Is there something in its interior that is still warm enough to drive this activity?

Beast from the East blamed for Scotland missing climate change target

Closed due to snow
Image credit: BBC

You couldn’t make this stuff up. An artificial so-called climate target was defeated by one of nature’s cold snaps. The mind boggles at the idiotic pretentiousness of their climate obsession, helpless in the face of weather.
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The Beast from the East, which shut down much of the country in 2018, has been blamed for Scotland missing a climate target, says The Scotsman.

Unseasonably cold temperatures and heavy snowfall brought transport to a halt and closed schools in late February and early March two years ago.

Biomass: The Burning Question

What use is it? That would be the obvious one, when better alternatives not requiring ludicrously high subsidies are readily available.
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A new report from climate change think tank Ember reveals the cost of burning wood for power, with energy billpayers committed to subsidies of more than £13 billion, including £10bn at Drax power station alone.

In addition to the direct subsidy, we estimate biomass generators are receiving carbon tax breaks of £333 million a year.

The UK has now left the EU, and there’s an opportunity to reassess carbon pricing – including in the design of the UK emissions trading system.

In this research, we demonstrate why the UK should abandon the carbon tax break afforded to large power stations burning biomass (mostly wood in the form of pellets or chips).

Zero emission cars to get green number plates

Image credit: DFT

Is this the thin end of the green wedge, as EV owners get ever more preferential treatment from the authorities – on the roads every UK citizen has to pay for?
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Drivers of zero-emission cars are to be given green number plates which could make them eligible to by-pass congestion zone charges or secure cheaper parking, says Metro News.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said they will be available from autumn and would help ‘show people that a greener transport future is within our grasp’.

The move is designed to make switching to electric vehicles more appealing as the government looks to meet its target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

Britain Goes Nuclear As Rolls-Royce Triggers £250 Billion Mini Reactor Race

Small modular reactor [credit: ANS Nuclear Cafe]

Could this be the British version of a ‘green recovery’? The government must or should know that ‘net zero’ policy based mostly on wind and solar power is not a workable option.
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A consortium of British businesses led by manufacturing giant Rolls-Royce has submitted proposals to Ministers to accelerate the building of a new fleet of mini nuclear reactors in the North of England, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF). 

The plans, circulated in Whitehall ‘in the last few weeks’, could see construction of high-tech factories to build the small reactors begin by next year.

The consortium – which includes UK construction and engineering firms Laing O’Rourke, Atkins and BAM Nuttall – would use British intellectual property to build the reactors. It would work with partners from the US, Canada and France.

It has been estimated that exporting small nuclear reactor technology could be worth £250billion to the UK if the programme is successful.

Sources told The Mail on Sunday that the plan is ‘starting to resonate’ in parts of Government because it could boost the economy as the country recovers from the destruction wrought by the pandemic.

Journalist claims carbon dioxide is ‘slowly but surely killing us all’

Electric ferry Ellen [image credit: Erik Christensen @ Wikipedia]

No evidence is offered, of course. The article is about an electric ferry, but the temptation to lapse into lurid climate propaganda was obviously too great. As for the ferry, the article implies the batteries will last for 30 years, which looks ambitious to say the least.
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Ellen, Denmark’s first all-electric ferry, has completed its first 10 months of revenue service, reports CleanTechnica.

Passengers like its silent running and absence of diesel fumes.

The operator likes that it costs less to run than a diesel-powered ferry.

UK Government prepares Jet Zero Council for take-off

Avinor’s electric plane [image credit: inhabitat.com]

More ‘net zero’ tomfoolery. Batteries are heavy and unlike fuel don’t allow the plane to lose weight during flight, meaning harder landings or lower carrying capacity. Meanwhile biofuel still emits carbon dioxide, which is supposed to be what the climate obsession is about.
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Transport Secretary Grant Shapps has today announced a dual boost to the UK’s nascent low carbon aviation sector, confirming the formation of a new ‘Jet Zero Council’ and the award of fresh funding for green fuel specialist Velocsys, reports BusinessGreen.

Shapps used his appearance at the daily coronavirus press conference to announce the moves, which he said would support the government’s vision of a “greener transport future”.

Building on the recent confirmation the government is to invest £2bn in new active transport infrastructure, Shapps said the challenge was “to make transport – currently our biggest emitter of greenhouse gases – part of the solution, not the problem”.

He added that decarbonisation was particularly difficult for an aviation industry that has faced an “impossible few months” as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

The Dansgaard-Oeschger 1470 year climate cycle is anomalistic

This is easily shown from the 74 Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in the period:
1 J-S = 19.865036 sidereal years = 19.865036*365.25636 days = 7255.8307
(7255.8307*74) / 365.259636 (anomalistic year) = 1469.99945 (1470)

So Earth reaches its perihelion with the Sun exactly 1470 times per 74 J-S.

Both numbers are even, so why is the Dansgaard-Oeschger event not at half the period?
The short answer is: Neptune.

Still waiting for greenhouse: No response to my last email to Roy Spencer

Before the last time I had to dive deeply into politics to defend the EU referendum result, I had an email conversation with Roy Spencer in an attempt to resolve the conflict between physicists like himself, who believe the radiative greenhouse theory is correct, but it’s effect small, and physicists like Ned Nikolov, who contend that the theory is fundamentally incorrect.

After a couple of to and fro emails I sent this response in Feb 2019, to which I never received a reply. It’s time we got this discussion back out in the open, because Boris’ green reset #netzero plan for the UK post Brexit and post pandemic is set to ruin our economy and cause untold suffering, deprivation, and death.

the lukewarmers have utterly failed to convince the fanatics that although they think their theory is correct (it isn’t, but that’s their misguided opinion), they’ve overestimated the magnitude of the effect.

It’s time they stopped supporting the fanatics by deploying false arguments against better theory which will exonerate CO2 and move the debate away from ridiculous and expensive ‘mitigation’, and forward to adaption to the effects of natural climatic change.

New ‘sun clock’ quantifies extreme space weather switch on/off

Sunspots [image credit: NASA]

The researchers’ sun clock looks like this.
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Extreme space weather events can significantly impact systems such as satellites, communications systems, power distribution and aviation, says a Warwick University press release.

They are driven by solar activity which is known to have an irregular but roughly 11 year cycle.

By devising a new, regular ‘sun clock’, researchers have found that the switch on and off of periods of high solar activity is quite sharp, and are able to determine the switch on/off times.

Their analysis shows that whilst extreme events can happen at any time, they are much less likely to occur in the quiet interval.

The great green reset is at odds with economic and energy reality.

From Forbes, by Tilak Doshi H/T to Andrew Gibson

As the world emerges from Covid-19 lockdown we are now being told that the economic recovery from the pandemic-panic needs to be “green.” Political leaders and mass media editors cite the well-known slogan “never let a crisis go to waste,” and claim that massive sums need to be spent on economic recovery plans, and that the spending has to be “sustainable.”

Prince Charles – a prognosticator of apocalyptic climate change – said at the opening of a virtual World Economic Forum event that the global pandemic presented an opportunity to “reset the global economy and prioritize sustainable development.” Using similar language, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab calls for a “Great Reset” of capitalism. Seeing a silver lining in the pandemic, he advocates “radical changes” to “create a new economic system” including sustainably green urban infrastructure.

Trump Order Confronts Big Tech Bias

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Social media getting its wings clipped? Lawyers should do well out of it.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

President Trump finally issued an Executive Order targeting viewpoint discrimination by Big Tech social media companies. The Order grows out of Trump’s summit on this thorny issue last July. Topping the list of targets are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Google, but there are many other possibilities.

This form of discrimination is very much uncharted legal territory. The chosen central concept for Big Tech wrongdoing is “censorship”, as the EO is titled “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship”. This choice in itself is a strategic legal decision.

The Order is basically a hunting license for federal agencies. There are two distinct parts. The first is basically laying out a number of legal arguments. If you are not familiar with the legal issues this may seem like empty rhetoric, but it is actually the opposite. The lawyers who wrote this order are preparing to…

View original post 750 more words

Island ‘drowning’ is not inevitable as sea levels rise

Another bunch of climate alarmist predictions get exposed as over-the-top doom-mongering — literally, in this case.

Coral reef islands across the world could naturally adapt to survive the impact of rising sea levels, according to new research reported at Phys.org.

Coral reef islands across the world could naturally adapt to survive the impact of rising sea levels, according to new research.

The increased flooding caused by the changing global climate has been predicted to render such communities—where sandy or gravel islands sit on top of coral reef platforms—uninhabitable within decades.

However, an international study led by the University of Plymouth (UK) suggests that perceived fate is far from a foregone conclusion.

UK consumers face £2-3bn annual bill to prevent green-energy blackouts

Price gouging on the grand scale to keep the ruinables show on the road, regardless of electricity grid stability. But our leaders love this fiasco and label it as climate policy, so that’s OK? No, but they seem to face few obstacles to their blinkered obsession, even though the problems look bound to get worse.
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Lockdown reveals the UK’s power grid is fragile, costly, and failing – because of renewables, says Dr. Benny Peiser @ Climate Change Dispatch.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is today publishing a collection of papers by energy expert Dr. John Constable, documenting the rapid decay of the UK electricity system, with system balancing costs spiraling out of control over the last few weeks.

The cost of balancing the grid over the Bank Holiday weekend amounted to £50m, and National Grid has predicted additional costs of £700m from May to August alone.

High snow levels indicate very weak Nordic power prices this summer

Was it like this?

This story may not make headline news, so let’s give it an airing here. Nordic countries are well used to winter snow, so when they talk of a ‘snow-rich’ winter they mean exactly that.
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Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are likely to be unusually low this summer amid high inflows to hydropower plants, caused by a combination of a very snow-rich winter and late snowmelt, says Phys.org.

Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are likely to be unusually low this summer amid high inflows to hydropower plants, caused by a combination of a very snow-rich winter and late snowmelt.

“May was cooler than normal in Scandinavia and June has also started on the cool side. This has led to snowpack melting a bit later than it usually does,” Nathalie Schaller, a senior researcher at CICERO Center for International Climate Research, said during a webinar organised on 8 June as part of the S2S4E project.

UK government may give drivers £6,000 to switch to electric cars

Not the latest model

Obviously bribery is thought to be the only way, short of coercion, to appeal to reluctant drivers who see clearly enough the various disadvantages and high cost of EVs they were never asked if they wanted to buy. Under cover of the virus situation they plan to pour more public money down their ideological drain to appease the greenblob.
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It has been reported that Boris Johnson is considering launching a car scrappage scheme to boost the automotive industry, says The Shropshire Star.

Motoring and environmental groups have welcomed the prospect of a new car scrappage scheme encouraging motorists to switch to electric vehicles.

The AA described it as “fantastic” while Greenpeace said it would be “moving in the right direction”.

Climate scientists praise global warming ‘hiatus’ science boost

So when global temperatures failed to behave as models expected due to inevitable but hard to predict natural variation, they were forced to re-think – or just think? The GWPF concludes, at the risk of stating the obvious: ‘The lesson of the hiatus is that we do not understand internal climatic variability as much as many think we do, and our predictive power is less than many believe.’
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Researchers from the Universities of Princeton, California, Tokyo, Kyushu and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, say the recent hiatus in global temperature increase has led to a surge in climate science.

The global effort to understand the global warming hiatus they say has led to increased understanding of some of the key metrics of global climate change such as global temperature and ice-cover.

Searching for an answer to the hiatus, they say, meant that the scientific community grappled with difficulties with these climate metrics, in particular the fact that they do not unequivocally portray the same story about global warming.

Astronomers unveil the magnetic field of the solar corona

During a total solar eclipse, the Sun’s corona and prominences are visible to the naked eye [image credit: Luc Viatour / https://Lucnix.be ]

There’s an interesting time-series animation of the solar corona here. Clear differences in the corona at solar minimum compared to maximum were observed by the globetrotting researchers.
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While the world has been dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have been hard at work studying the solar corona, the outermost atmosphere of the sun which expands into interplanetary space, reports Phys.org.

This stream of charged particles radiating from the surface of the sun is called the solar wind and expands to fill the entire solar system.

The properties of the solar corona are a consequence of the sun’s complex magnetic field, which is produced in the solar interior and extends outward.

A new study by IfA graduate student Benjamin Boe, published Wednesday, June 3rd in the Astrophysical Journal, used total solar eclipse observations to measure the shape of the coronal magnetic field with higher spatial resolution and over a larger area than ever before.

Delingpole: Britain Unleashes a Green New Deal to Kill What’s Left of the Economy

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

Unsurprisingly the author is not impressed with the UK government’s plans for a post-COVID job creation scheme. Where’s the wealth creation in subsidised jobs within subsidised industries?

The Chancellor has found an ingenious scheme to ensure the UK never recovers from the lockdown: a ‘green industrial revolution’, says James Delingpole @ Breitbart News.

According to The Times of London: