40 Countries Discuss Depriving World Of Inexpensive Safe Energy

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Wind, solar and a few batteries are not going to propel less developed countries to any sort of prosperity.

PA Pundits International

By Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris~

It should be no surprise to our readers that socialists across the world would recognize an opportunity in the china-virus pandemic to further handicap the use of inexpensive dependable fossil fuels to raise the standard of living of the poorest of the world by forcing them to use only undependable expensive wind and solar energy. The pandemic has allowed a world wide experiment in socialism where governments have been able to exercise tyrannical power over their citizens.

On Thursday, July 9, the International Energy Agency (IEA) convened a huge on-line event, pictured above, misleadingly titled the Clean Energy Transitions Summit. It brought together government representatives of 40 of the world’s largest economies as well as developing nations, accounting for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Although IEA executive director Dr. Fatih Birol called the summit “the most important…

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Powerful eruptions on the Sun might trigger earthquakes

Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]

The idea being proposed is described as a reverse piezo-electrical effect.
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Ground-shaking earthquakes occur all across the globe. And according to a new study, many of them might be triggered by the Sun, says Astronomy.com.

Through decades of research, scientists have learned that large, powerful earthquakes commonly occur in groups, not in random patterns. But exactly why has so far remained a mystery.

Now, new research, published July 13 in Scientific Reviews, asserts the first strong — though still disputed — evidence that powerful eruptions on the Sun can trigger mass earthquake events on Earth.

The biofuel boom was doomed from the start

That’s the verdict of OilPrice.com. Climate catastrophists seem more interested in other supposed panaceas these days.
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Why haven’t biofuels taken off? For years they have been touted as the fuel of the future, with high-profile commercial aircraft making headlines for pioneering all-biofuel international flights and promising a greener future for air travel.

The first transatlantic flight powered solely by biofuel, a Gulfstream G450 owned by Honeywell International Inc., took place nearly a decade ago, in 2011, and was lauded as a harbinger of green jet fuel for all.

At that time, Honeywell Vice President Jim Rekoske told the world, “We’re ready to go to commercial scale and commercial use.”

But now, nine years later, the biofuel revolution that we were promised, both in the air and on our highways, is nowhere to be seen.

EU Embroiled In €24 Billion Bogus Climate Accounting Scandal

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

The EU is no stranger to audit problems and accounting stories, let’s say, and this one maintains the tradition. Pretending to ‘tackle climate change’ can be expensive of course.
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Brussels has been dragged into a bogus accounting scandal after it was claimed climate change spending had been overblown by at least €24 billion, reports the Daily Express.

The European Court of Auditors has questioned the European Commission’s claims about its climate-change programmes.

It was found the European Union’s powerful executive had substantially overestimated the amount it spent on preventing global warming through the use of clever-accounting.

Tree planting does not always boost ecosystem carbon stocks, study finds

Looks like another setback for those looking for solutions to imaginary problems.
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Planting huge numbers of trees to mitigate climate change is “not always the best strategy”—with some experimental sites in Scotland failing to increase carbon stocks, a new study has found.

Experts at the University of Stirling and the James Hutton Institute analysed four locations in Scotland where birch trees were planted onto heather moorland—and found that, over decades, there was no net increase in ecosystem carbon storage, reports Phys.org.

The team—led by Dr. Nina Friggens, of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Stirling—found that any increase to carbon storage in tree biomass was offset by a loss of carbon stored in the soil.

Solar Cycle Update

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SC 25 – are we nearly there yet?

Spaceweather.com

July 14, 2020: NOAA has released a new interactive tool to explore the solar cycle. It lets you scroll back through time, comparing sunspot counts now to peaks and valleys of the past. One thing is clear. Solar Minimum is here, and it’s one of the deepest in a century.

Solar Minimum is a natural part of the solar cycle. Every ~11 years, the sun transitions from high to low activity and back again. Solar Maximum. Solar Minimum. Repeat. The cycle was discovered in 1843 by Samuel Heinrich Schwabe, who noticed the pattern after counting sunspots for 17 years. We are now exiting Solar Cycle 24 and entering Solar Cycle 25.

During Solar Minimum, the sun is usually blank–that is, without sunspots. The solar disk often looks like a big orange billiard ball:

The spotless sun on July 13, 2020

In 2019, the sun went 281 days without sunspots, and…

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Climate models: No warming for 30 years – possibly

Instead of promoting meaningless climate thresholds, targets etc., alarmists might want to take a closer look at the neglected topic of natural factors.
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A new study demonstrates how a prolonged warming pause or even global cooling may happen in coming years despite increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases — caused by natural climatic variability, says The GWPF.

Natural climatic variability has always been a topic that contains a lot of unknowns, but it has been rarely explicitly stated just how little we know about it.

Such variability has been habitually underplayed as it was “obvious” that the major driver of global temperature was the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, with natural variability a weaker effect.

But the global temperature data of this century demonstrate that natural variability has dominated in the form of El Ninos.

Move over, Golf: Volkswagen ID.3 EV sales open to public in Europe on 20 July

VW ID.3 [image credit: Alexander Migl @ Wikipedia]

The car is about the same size as VW’s Golf model but weighs 200 kilograms more due to the battery, which has an 8 year guarantee. What is guaranteed is not clear. List prices for most versions are well in excess of 30,000 euros, but subsidies are on offer. Don’t all rush at once…
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Volkswagen ID.3 latest news

Even before the Volkswagen ID.3 goes on sale, it has managed to pick up an award – from carwow!

The ID.3 collected the Most Wanted award at the 2019 carwow Car of the Year awards, says Green Car Congress.

This award is given to the brand that has the most-read news story here on carwow – and the ID.3 scooped that accolade by some margin.

‘Not all biomass is carbon neutral’, industry admits

This states the obvious of course. More carbon dioxide is emitted per unit of energy from biomass than from coal, undermining claims of ‘climate benefits’, and wood pellet production is energy-intensive. But ‘carbon targets’ mean the biomass obsession goes on due to lack of alternatives, given general dislike of nuclear power.
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Leading industry figures acknowledge that not all biomass brings benefits to the climate, insisting that only low-value wood and forest residues should make the cut under EU law, says Euractiv.

“Not all biomass is good biomass,” says Jennifer Jenkins, chief sustainability officer at Enviva, a US-based company which is the world’s largest producer of industrial wood pellets used for electricity and heat production.

“We agree that not all biomass should automatically be categorised as carbon neutral,” Jenkins told an online debate organised on 29 June during EU sustainable energy week.

Vijay Jayaraj: India Crafts Fossil Pathway to Secure its Future

Credit: Coal India Limited

In some countries ’emissions’ obsessed leaders stumble around looking for non-existent net-zero pathways to their imaginary climate heaven. But India’s recent approach towards fossil utilization can be summed up in three words: “No Holds Barred”, says the author.
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India is on the way to becoming a fossil fuel-based energy powerhouse of the 21st century, says Vijay Jayaraj @ The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

India’s developmental goals for the future are quite ambitious. They ought to be: From tackling the surging poverty rates to providing affordable utilities, the country faces a steep challenge.

The key to achieving any of its developmental goals is a strong energy sector.

India is the third largest energy consuming nation and is following the fossil fuel pathway (like the West did during the 20th century) to achieve energy independence in the near future.

Is ‘Planet Nine’ actually a grapefruit-sized black hole?

Credit: NASA

Could there even be more than one black hole? The search for a significant extra planet has drawn a blank so far.
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A coming sky survey will help test a wild idea — that a grapefruit-sized black hole lurks undiscovered in the outer solar system, says Mike Wall @ Space.com.

Over the past few years, researchers have noticed an odd clustering in the orbits of multiple trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which dwell in the dark depths of the far outer solar system.

Some scientists have hypothesized that the TNOs’ paths have been sculpted by the gravitational pull of a big object way out there, something 5 to 10 times more massive than Earth (though others think the TNOs may just be tugging on each other).

This big “perturber,” if it exists, may be a planet — the so-called “Planet Nine,” or “Planet X” or “Planet Next” for those who will always regard Pluto as the ninth planet.

But there’s another possibility as well: The shepherding object may be a black hole, one that crams all that mass into a sphere the size of a grapefruit.

Dom Cummings sets up No.10 ‘skunkworks’ tasked with roadmapping #netzero

Lockheed Martin skunkworks
Credit: Wikipedia commons

No 10 has posted a civil service job advertisement for the head of a new analytical unit, who, the job description said, will work inside Downing Street for two years, says a report in the Guardian.

“The analytical unit, known as 10 ‘data science’ or ‘10ds’ is a pseudo startup within No 10 designed to drive forward the quantitative revolution. The current plan is to establish a data engineering team, data science team, a skunkworks and an analytical deep dive unit,” it said.

A wetter world as solar grand minimum deepens.

Image credit: Tallbloke

A few days ago I tweeted this comment above some remarkable video of the Three Gorges Dam bypass sluices.

The atmosphere cools and shrinks when the Sun gets sleepy. Rain is wrung out of it like a sponge. We have been entering a solar grand minimum since 2008. The bottom of it will be around 2035. https://t.co/2b6LlanjFH

— Rog Tallbloke (Righto/Chief) 🇬🇧 (@RogTallbloke) July 8, 2020

Among other people, this was picked up by Willis, the warmist at WUWT, who used it as an opportunity to attack the reality of the Sun-climate connection:

“5 Years To Climate Breakdown”: How to generate computer model scares

Credit: nationalreview.com

Climate models are too unreliable to be any serious guide to the future, as the author points out. But getting decision makers to understand that is near-impossible in many countries, hence the acceptance of alarmist nonsense.
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Shock, horror: According to the WMO and the Met Office, there is a 3% chance of the forthcoming five-year global temperature average exceeding 1.5°C, says Dr. David Whitehouse @ The GWPF.

There are several definitions of hustle. One of them is to use forceful actions to promote an action or point of view.

It’s everywhere of course and in all aspects of climate change. It’s all too apparent when scientists want grants, jobs and headlines.

It’s no new discovery that combining hustle with statistics can get you anywhere.

The recently released news from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), prepared by the UK Met Office, that there is a “growing chance” of the world exceeding the “Paris threshold” of 1.5°C in global temperature above pre-industrial levels is a prime example of this.

Road plans will scupper CO2 targets, report says

Image credit: RAC

Hardly a day goes by without a climate propaganda item from the BBC, and here’s another one, laced with pollution claims as well. Now it’s claimed even electric cars are bad for the environment, if not for the climate. No mention of trucks, buses, taxis, tractors, vans and the like, which can’t work from home or switch to cycling. The madness never ends.
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The vast majority of emissions cuts from electric cars will be wiped out by new road-building, a report says.

The government says vehicle emissions per mile will fall as zero-emissions cars take over Britain’s roads.

But the report says the 80% of the CO2 savings from clean cars will be negated by the £27bn planned roads programme, reports BBC News.

It adds that if ministers want a “green recovery” the cash would be better spent on public transport, walking, cycling, and remote-working hubs.

And they point out that the electric cars will continue to increase local air pollution through particles eroding from brakes and tyres.

Exploiting Calamities And Climate To Push Socialism

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Unfortunately ‘the science’ of the climate is at most a sideshow in political circles.

PA Pundits International

By Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris~

It should be no surprise to our readers that climate change was never a scientific issue, though politicians and well—financed scientists promoted it as such. It has always been a political movement aimed at increasing the size of government and installing a Socialist system. Such a system would eliminate individual freedom while enhancing the control of the elites to achieve their ultimate goal: power over the people.

It was a very transparent plan: convince the public that life—giving carbon dioxide is a danger to humanity and that, were the Earth to be a few degrees warmer, disaster would necessarily follow. You buy this dystopian fantasy and you give your government control of the very breathe you exhale, the number of children you are allowed and every kilowatt of energy your life may consume. As fantastically absurd as this fiction is, those who…

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Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK power outages

Windy Standard wind farm, Scotland [credit: RWE.com]

H/T Chaeremon

We’re supposed to believe that spending £25 million is going to somehow make UK power supplies cheaper. No explanation of where the energy for the flywheel is going to come from. Maybe more trees will have to be burnt, as wind can’t be relied on? Don’t even think about a catastrophic failure of the flywheel itself.

A giant flywheel in the north-east of Scotland could soon help prevent power outages across Britain by mimicking the effect of a power plant but without using fossil fuels, reports FR24News.

The pioneering project near Keith in Moray, which would cost around £25 million, will not produce electricity or produce carbon emissions – but it could help keep the lights on by stabilizing the grid’s electrical frequency.

Norwegian energy company Statkraft hopes that starting next winter, the new flywheel, designed by a division of General Electric, will be able to mimic the rotating turbines of a traditional power plant, which have helped balance the network frequency at around 50 hertz for decades.

New study detects ringing of the global atmosphere

Researchers now want to ‘understand both the processes that excite the waves and the processes that act to damp the waves.’
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A ringing bell vibrates simultaneously at a low-pitched fundamental tone and at many higher-pitched overtones, producing a pleasant musical sound, says Phys.org.

A recent study, just published in the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, shows that the Earth’s entire atmosphere vibrates in an analogous manner, in a striking confirmation of theories developed by physicists over the last two centuries.

In the case of the atmosphere, the “music” comes not as a sound we could hear, but in the form of large-scale waves of atmospheric pressure spanning the globe and traveling around the equator, some moving east-to-west and others west-to-east.

Each of these waves is a resonant vibration of the global atmosphere, analogous to one of the resonant pitches of a bell.

The basic understanding of these atmospheric resonances began with seminal insights at the beginning of the 19th century by one of history’s greatest scientists, the French physicist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Research by physicists over the subsequent two centuries refined the theory and led to detailed predictions of the wave frequencies that should be present in the atmosphere. However, the actual detection of such waves in the real world has lagged behind the theory.

Now in a new study by Takatoshi Sakazaki, an assistant professor at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Science, and Kevin Hamilton, an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences and the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, the authors present a detailed analysis of observed atmospheric pressure over the globe every hour for 38 years.

The results clearly revealed the presence of dozens of the predicted wave modes.

Full article here.

A Major Outbreak of Noctilucent Clouds

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Is the natural world trying to tell us something, as the solar minimum continues?

Spaceweather.com

July 6, 2020: Last night, July 5-6, a major outbreak of noctilucent clouds (NLCs) blanketed Europe. Electric-blue tendrils of frosted meteor smoke rippled over almost every European capital from Scandinavia to the Adriatic. “It was the most phenomenal display of NLCs I’ve seen in my life,” says Viktor Veres, who photographed the outbreak from Budapest, Hungary:

“I was just getting ready for dinner when one of my friends, Alex, cried ‘NLC party time!’,” says Veres. “The electric-blue clouds were almost directly overhead. I sprinted to the car (partially dressing in the street) and drove up Gellért Hill for a view of the clouds over the most famous sights of Budapest–the Danube River, Chain Bridge, Buda Castle, and Parliament. And, yes, my dinner got cold.”

Paris was also “overcast” by noctilucent clouds. “They were very bright,” reports Bertrand Kulik, who shot them floating above the Eiffel Tower:

“The shapes of the…

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Seeing results of large emission cuts on global warming may take decades – study

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

In climate fantasy world, everything is near-constant except human-caused trace gas emissions. Pathetic that this is considered to be serious science, rather than juvenile nonsense.
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Humans may need to “wait for decades” to see the results of large emission cuts on global surface temperatures, scientists have said.

Researchers in Norway used computer simulations to analyse various scenarios that looked at the effects of rapid reductions in several types of greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and black carbon, says TalkTalk.

They found that although large-scale emission cuts are needed to achieve the global climate goals, it may take decades before the effects of the reductions on temperatures can be measured.