UK National Lottery fund jumps on climate change bandwagon

Lottery balls

Not many organisations can resist the pressure to resort to imagined virtue signalling in the era of the fake human-caused climate emergency, but there’s no jackpot from this losing bet.
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The first grants as part of a ten-year £100m National Lottery-funded Climate Action Fund have been rolled-out to communities across the UK to help tackle climate change, reports Casino Beats.

The National Lottery Community Fund has announced an initial £14m in grants as it aims to reduce the carbon footprint of communities and support movements that can demonstrate what is possible when people take the lead in tackling climate change.

Financial aid from The National Lottery Community Fund will support these projects to work together, share learning and be catalysts for broader and transformative change.

California’s Blackout Warning

Solar power complex in California [USA. Gov – BLM – Bureau of Land Management]

How does it feel to be the canaries in the coal mine of the renewables stampede now being promoted far and wide by climate obsessives with a failing atmospheric theory?

H/T The GWPF
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Anti-fossil fuel mandates are leading to electricity shortages.

Electricity blackouts are awful at any time, but especially during an extreme heat wave and for reasons that are man-made, says The Wall Street Journal.

That’s what millions in California have been enduring in recent days, and their plight is a warning to the rest of America about the risks of Green New Deal policies.

The California Independent System Operator (Caiso), which manages the state’s power grid, declared a high-level emergency Friday and Saturday evenings and ordered utilities to reduce power usage.

California and most of the southwestern U.S. are experiencing a severe heat wave. But other states are managing to keep power flowing. Why can’t California?

Renewable biogas from cow manure injected into grid in UK first

UK first or UK farce? Another consequence of the irrational fear of trace gases in the atmosphere.
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Renewable biogas made from cow manure has been injected into the National Grid in a UK first which will create enough energy to power ten homes for a year, reports yahoo! news.

The Murrow Anaerobic Digestion Plant in Cambridgeshire mixed the manure with straw and left it in an oxygen-free environment to produce methane, which has been sold to the grid so people can use it to cook meals and heat their homes.

Biogas is being increasingly looked at by energy companies as it offers far better carbon emissions savings than natural methane gas.

Ian Plimer: The Australian Press Council is a hive of climate zealots

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Truth-starved climate propaganda and its backers get a good going-over from the ever-robust Professor.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
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As a result of an activist campaign, the Australian Press Council took exception to my article in The Australian on November 22, 2019, says Ian Plimer @ Spectator AU.

They claimed that my statement that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims” was false.

Journalists in the Press Council should know basic English and the difference between an element (carbon) and a compound (carbon dioxide).

This is elementary schoolkid’s science. For the Press Council to claim that this is factually incorrect shows breathtaking ignorance.

Kyoto University and Toyota test 1,000 km per-charge EV battery

Toyota’s Prius model

They say solid-state batteries – unlike lithium-ion ones – can’t catch fire, but on the other hand the electrolyte needs to be warmed up. Years of technical challenges still lie ahead, it seems.
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A team of researchers from Kyoto University and Toyota Motor is making solid progress developing next-generation battery technology that has the potential to cram far more energy into a small, lightweight package than today’s standard lithium-ion, or li-ion, batteries, says Nikkei Asian Review.

The new fluoride-ion battery the researchers are working on, which would hold about seven times as much energy per unit of weight as conventional li-ion batteries, could allow electric vehicles to run 1,000 km on a single charge.

The team has developed a prototype rechargeable battery based on fluoride, the anion — the negatively charged ion — of elemental fluorine.

BBC promotes its climate agenda on the back of recent train crash

Credit: BBC

Another round of the usual ‘scientists agree’ assertions without saying which scientists, what exactly they supposedly agree on, and where the evidence – if it exists – can be found.
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It’s already clear that torrential rain played a significant part in the first fatal derailment in the UK since 2007.

Scotland’s Transport Minister Michael Matheson has confirmed the conditions were a factor and Network Rail footage shows there were landslides in the area.

The climate is changing and scientists agree it’s very different to when the railways were built by our Victorian ancestors, claims BBC News.

Though landslips are not uncommon, particularly in that area around Stonehaven, climate change means they are happening much more frequently as the land struggles to cope with the volume of water.

Claim: cutting speed limits could slow climate change

The assertion being of course that human-caused emissions of the trace gas carbon dioxide somehow have a specific effect on the Earth’s climate, which must be countered. But if everyone is forced into electric cars, the speed limit argument becomes obsolete. Lower speed limits also mean more vehicles on the road at any one time, trying to complete their journeys, which in turn could lead to more traffic delays, potentially undermining the whole idea. As usual they conflate pollution and climate arguments to cause confusion.
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Canadian cities from Edmonton to Montreal are lowering speed limits, primarily in an attempt to save lives, says CBC News.

But slowing down may also be an easy way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution — not just on urban roadways but also on highways (and even the high seas).

Study outlines five thermal energy grand challenges for decarbonization

Green dreamland

Only five ‘grand’ challenges? Better be quick — we keep hearing there’s supposed to be a climate emergency on. Yes, throw out existing successful energy solutions when there’s nothing of equivalence to replace them with. Then wonder what to do next, while muttering about climate change. Great plan! Or maybe not.
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Solar and wind power are an important part of solving the problem of climate change, but these renewable technologies on their own probably will never provide the energy for many industrial processes, like making steel, reports TechXplore.

Approximately 90 percent of the world’s energy use involves generation or manipulation of heat, including the cooling of buildings and food.

Maintaining modern economies and improving life in developing economies while mitigating climate change will require five major advances in how we convert, store and transmit thermal energy, according to a new paper in Nature Energy from Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

North London bus garage to become ‘virtual power station’

BYD electric bus, London [image credit: China Daily]

What effect this could have on the life of the bus batteries remains to be seen, but it’s unlikely to be beneficial. The efficiency or otherwise of the power transfer process is also open to question.
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A north London bus garage is to become the world’s largest trial site for a new eco-friendly method of generating electricity, reports the Evening Standard.

Northumberland Park garage is to be transformed into a “virtual power station” – taking energy stored in the batteries of parked electric buses and feeding it back into the electricity network.

Putting energy back into the grid when demand is high and recharging buses when demand is low helps make the network more efficient by balancing the peaks and troughs.

The Government-funded Bus2Grid project will become operational in November and will run for three years.

Cosmic Rays and the Weakening Solar Cycle

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Which brings us back to the old conundrum: do cosmic rays affect the Earth’s weather / climate, and if so, how and how much?

Spaceweather.com

August 11, 2020: Cosmic rays are bad–and they’re probably going to get worse.

That’s the conclusion of a new study entitled “Galactic Cosmic Radiation in Interplanetary Space Through a Modern Secular Minimum” just published in the journal Space Weather.

“During the next solar cycle, we could see cosmic ray dose rates increase by as much as 75%,” says lead author Fatemeh Rahmanifard of the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center. “This will limit the amount of time astronauts can work safely in interplanetary space.”

Cosmic rays are the bane of astronauts. They come from deep space, energetic particles hurled in all directions by supernova explosions and other violent events. No amount of spacecraft shielding can stop the most energetic particles, leaving astronauts exposed whenever they leave the Earth-Moon system.

Back in the 1990s, astronauts could travel through space for as much as 1000 days before they…

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Scientists invent smart electricity-storing bricks from ordinary ones

Electric storage heating has been around for decades, but this is a bit different, storing power rather than heat. After a predicted 10,000 recharge cycles performance may degrade. The researchers say: ‘Our supercapacitor technology adds value to a “dirt-cheap” construction material and demonstrates a scalable process affording energy storage for powering embedded microdevices in architectural applications that utilize fired brick.’
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Helping turn ordinary bricks into energy-storing ones is PEDOT — poly polystyrene sulfonate — a polymer that stores and conducts electricity, says MEA WorldWide.

The walls of your home are capable of storing electricity, like batteries. It would need two materials: the humble red bricks and plastic, according to scientists who turned ordinary bricks into “smart” ones in their new study.

It opens up the possibility of plugging gadgets directly into American homes.

In fact, bricks are known for absorbing and storing the sun’s heat. And because buildings can take up large amounts of space, researchers from Washington University in St Louis wondered if it can also store electricity. So they began testing the feasibility of the idea.

Past evidence supports complete loss of Arctic sea ice by 2035, say researchers

Still waiting

Climate modellers have a fairly dismal record in trying to predict sea ice patterns in the Arctic, always erring on the side of too much warming. Will this research do anything to improve matters? They seem to be using Earth’s past climate as a guide, while asserting that human-caused carbon dioxide is the main problem today.
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A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035, reports Phys.org.

High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial—the warm period around 127,000 years ago—have puzzled scientists for decades.

Now the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an international team of researchers to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during the last interglacial with present day.

Their findings are important for improving predictions of future sea ice change.

Cascading Fallacies In Climate Risk Assessment

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Where are the limits of climate fantasy? New Zealand seems to be pushing them with this ‘assessment’.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

As a logician, I am always on the lookout for fallacies and there is no lack of them in climate change alarmist policies. New Zealand’s newly released climate risk assessment not only has multiple fallacies, they build on one another in a cascade.

This is not about New Zealand. The authors of the assessment make clear that theirs is a new approach which they hope will be used globally. So this is about the world, including America.

The massive report is titled “First national climate change risk assessment for New Zealand.” Under New Zealand’s climate law, these assessments are supposed to be done every five years and this is the first.

The scope is breathtaking. The idea is to identify all of the significant risks due to human caused climate change that will be present in 2050 and 2100. Moreover, these supposed risks are prioritized.

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Two interacting gas giants orbit sun-like star WASP-148

Super-WASP telescope site, La Palma [image credit: lapalma-island.com]

In nearly six years there are 247 b and 63 c orbits. Since 248:62 is 4:1, it can be seen why the observed ‘acceleration and deceleration’ of the planets might occur.
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Astronomers using the SuperWASP-North telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands, Spain, and the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence, France, have discovered two giant exoplanets circling the G-type dwarf star WASP-148, reports Science News.

WASP-148 is a slowly rotating, inactive G-dwarf star 809 light-years away in the constellation of Hercules.

Also known as TYC 3083-295-1 and 2MASS J16563135+4418095, the star has the same mass and radius as the Sun.

WASP-148 hosts a planetary system composed of at least two giant planets, WASP-148b and c.

Renewables in Europe: Land requirement is an area the size of Portugal

We brace ourselves for another visit to green fantasy land (‘according to the study’) where progress to imaginary nirvana is just around the corner, regardless of glaringly obvious realities pointing the other way.
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Transitioning our energy supply from coal, oil and gas to wind and solar power is feasible, claims TechXplore. [Talkshop comment – empty assertion].

However, renewables require more land than conventional forms of energy generation.

The most affordable option for a fully renewable electricity supply in Europe is based on solar parks and onshore windfarms.

However, this solution requires some 97,000 km2 land, or roughly 2% of the total area of the European Union—an area equivalent to the size of Portugal.

Massive Shetland wind farm plan runs into peatland protest

Shetland peat bog [image credit: Shetland Times]

There’s over £1 billion at stake here, as construction is about to start and a subsea cable project costing more than £600m has been approved, if the project goes ahead. It would be the UK’s largest onshore wind farm in terms of annual electricity output.
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OVER 20 people from across the isles have signed a petition expressing concern that Shetland Islands Council’s (SIC) recognition of a global climate emergency has not taken into account current evidence on the carbon value of peatland, reports Shetland News.

The petitioners say that since the original approval was given to the Viking Energy wind farm from the Scottish Government in 2012 “much of the science has fundamentally changed and we now indisputably recognise peatland as a store of carbon equal to or greater than that of rainforest”.

The petition seeks that the council considers a motion to cease immediately any entity involved in the “destruction of peatlands”.

It points to the current work taking place at Upper Kergord as peat is extracted to make way for an access track to a planned converter station.

Fossil fuels becoming ‘socially challenged’, says BP boss

The greenblob marches on, regardless of the real climate. Message to BP boss: water vapour is by far the major so-called greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is a minor sidekick. Ergo you are merely playing games.
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The chief executive of BP says he understands why people view the industry as “bad” and that fossil fuels are becoming the subject of social challenge, reports Aol.

Bernard Looney, who took on the role at the oil and gas giant in February, said the industry had “a challenge… with trust” but BP was determined to be a net zero carbon company by 2050.

Florida current is weaker now than at any point in the past century

Image credit: NASA

And by coincidence (?) so is the sun.
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A key component of the Gulf Stream has markedly slowed over the past century—that’s the conclusion of a new research paper in Nature Communications published on August 7, says Phys.org.

The study develops a method of tracking the strength of near-shore ocean currents using measurements made at the coast, offering the potential to reduce one of the biggest uncertainties related to observations of climate change over the past century.

“In the ocean, almost everything is connected,” said Christopher Piecuch, an assistant scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and author of the study. “We can use those connections to look at things in the past or far from shore, giving us a more complete view of the ocean and how it changes across space and time.”

Piecuch, who specializes in coastal and regional sea level change, used a connection between coastal sea level and the strength of near-shore currents to trace the evolution of the Florida Current, which forms the beginning of the Gulf Stream.

The Gulf Stream flows north along the Southeast Atlantic Coast of the United States and eventually east into the North Atlantic Ocean, carrying heat, salt, momentum, and other properties that influence Earth’s climate.

Because nearly continuous records of sea level stretch back more than a century along Florida’s Atlantic Coast and in some parts of the Caribbean, he was able to use mathematical models and simple physics to extend the reach of direct measurements of the Gulf Stream to conclude that it has weakened steadily and is weaker now than at any other point in the past 110 years.

One of the biggest uncertainties in climate models is the behavior of ocean currents either leading to or responding to changes in Earth’s climate. Of these, one of the most important is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, which is a large system or “conveyor belt” of ocean currents in the Atlantic that includes the Gulf Stream and that helps regulate global climate.

Piecuch’s analysis agrees with relationships seen in models between the deeper branches of the AMOC and the Gulf Stream, and it corroborates studies suggesting that the deeper branches of AMOC have slowed in recent years.

Full article here.

Solar cycle 14 – was the fourteenth solar cycle since 1755, when extensive recording of solar sunspot activity began. The solar cycle lasted 11.5 years, beginning in January 1902 and ending in July 1913. The maximum smoothed sunspot number (SIDC formula) observed during the solar cycle was 107.1, in February 1906 (the lowest since the Dalton Minimum) – Wikipedia

Hottest August day for 17 years in UK – or south-east England at least

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

So there was at least one higher temperature recorded in England in August 2003. Seventeen more years of increasing ’emissions’, which are supposed to be so dire according to a popular climate theory, haven’t made any difference to the peak figure so far. In fact July 2020 was noticeably cooler than average, but now a southerly wind has blown in some Saharan heat for a few days, most strongly to the near-continent regions. Not before time!
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The UK has seen its hottest day in August for 17 years, as temperatures reached more than 36C (96.8F) in south-east England, reports BBC News.

Crowds headed to the coast to enjoy the weather, but people have been urged to adhere to social distancing.

Warm weather will continue over the weekend for much of the UK, according to the Met Office.

The highest temperatures are expected in England and Wales, with fresher weather forecast for Scotland and NI.

The High Costs And Low Benefits Of Electric Vehicles

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Exposing some of the disconnects between carbo-phobe ideology, as expressed in (for example) UK private transport policy, and on-the-ground realities.

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

The rush to decarbonize every nation in the world in one or maybe two decades reflects the “I want it all NOW!” philosophy imbued through modern education systems. Current and recent former students – and their teachers – demand a perfect world (since they can envision one) and exhibit zero patience (hence the nationwide riots in the U.S.).

Hopefully the mad stampede to destroy the West’s ability to use fossil fuels at all will be sidelined by harsh realities of economics, logistics, and resource availability (including a hoped for reticence to rely on child slave labor to satisfy their blood lust). Yet the United Kingdom, formerly a bastion of sanity, has mandated, as part of its drive toward an all-electric society, the installation of electric vehicle charging stations in every home by 2030 and that all new cars and vans be hydrogen or electric vehicles (and…

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