UK Government ordered to release Net Zero cost calculations

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Don’t mention the cost…this could be the funniest thing you read all day today. Any ‘official estimate’ is almost certain to fall short of reality.
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London, 21 January: The government faces a major embarrassment after the Information Commissioner ordered the Treasury to release an email containing its official estimate of the cost of decarbonising the economy, says The GWPF.

In June 2019, some weeks after Parliament adopted the 2050 Net Zero target as law, the then chancellor Philip Hammond wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May, warning that her plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 was likely to cost the UK more than £1 trillion.

In his letter, the chancellor wrote that the costs meant that less funding would be available for schools, the police and hospitals, pointing out that Net Zero would render some industries “economically uncompetitive.”

Solar activity reconstructed over a millennium

This quote from the report stood out: ‘there are long-lasting periods of strong and weak solar activity, which is also reflected in the climate on Earth.’ Worth noting as we proceed through a period of weak activity right now.
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An international team of researchers led by ETH Zurich has reconstructed solar activity back to the year 969 using measurements of radioactive carbon in tree rings, reports Phys.org.

Those results help scientists to better understand the dynamics of the sun and allow more precise dating of organic materials using the C14 method.

What goes on in the sun can only be observed indirectly. Sunspots, for instance, reveal the degree of solar activity—the more sunspots are visible on the surface of the sun, the more active is our central star deep inside.

Conform to EU’s ‘carbon’ obsession – or pay its trading price

H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

How is this dogmatic ‘do as we do or else’ approach, of trying to impose narrow-minded climate views on the whole world, not going to stoke up a pointless trade war?
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If UN climate summit (COP26) fails to deliver, the EU will press ahead with unilateral carbon border taxes, EU official warns.

The European Union’s proposed carbon border charge is essential to the survival of its own industries and the bloc will impose the levy on non-EU competitors unless they commit to lowering their emissions, the bloc’s climate policy chief said on Monday.

The EU’s executive Commission is expected to propose its carbon border adjustment policy before the end of June as part of a broader package of climate laws aiming to cut emissions by 55% before the end of the decade.

Banning Gas-Powered Vehicles Means A Crushing Change For America

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‘By my plan, by 2045…’ – insert ‘about two decades after my term of office has ended’.

PA Pundits - International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

The election of the Biden-Harris ticket will, we are told, hasten the death of the internal combustion engine in the United States. Once the sale of new gasoline engine vehicles is banned, the only question remaining is how long before driving them is also outlawed? Well, incoming Vice President Kamala Harris promised that, “By my plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only. 100 percent by 2045.”

President-elect Biden has promised in his two trillion dollar “climate change” plan [a major downsize from Bernie Sanders’ $16 trillion Green New Deal] “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100 percent of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs).” Harris has called for this ban to begin by 2035, perhaps even sooner, if the momentum for change continues.

To jumpstart the transformation of the 99.5 percent of the…

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Carbon capture is vital to meeting climate goals, say scientists – but industrial-scale wood burning is OK?

Drax power station, generating 7% of Britain’s needs, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips.

More climate doublethink here. While supporting the burning of wood pellets to generate electricity, thereby creating massive carbon dioxide emissions that may reside in the atmosphere for a number of years, some climate obsessives insist that removing such emissions from the atmosphere is ‘desperately needed’. The illogicality of this has been largely ignored, but now Friends of the Earth Scotland and others have complained that CCS has a “history of over-promising and under-delivering”. Will CCS ever be viable either in terms of cost or practicality? If anything, current evidence points in the other direction.
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Supporters insist that storage technology is not a costly mistake but the best way for UK to cut emissions from heavy industry, says The Guardian.

Engineers and geologists have strongly criticised green groups who last week claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes – for reducing fossil fuel emissions – are costly mistakes.

Statistical politics: Prof. Mike Hulme on ‘politically charged’ climate baseline changes from 1961-1990 to 1991-2020: ‘In an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer’

Image credit: livescience.com

H/T Climate Depot

Nothing must stand in the way of the public being bombarded with supposed climate alarms, and told it’s their fault. Data jiggery-pokery serves a useful purpose in that aim – in this case, a kind of ‘climate reset’.
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Climates Multiple: Three Baselines, Two Tolerances, One Normal — Mike Hulme

Excerpt: “Friday 1 January 2021, a new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climatological standard normal came into effect. The ‘present-day’ climate will now formally be represented by the meteorological statistics of the period 1991-2020, replacing those from 1961-1990. National Meteorological Agencies in member states are instructed to issue new standard normals for observing stations and for associated climatological products. Climate will ‘change’, one might say, in an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer. It is somewhat equivalent to re-setting Universal Time or adjusting the exact definition of a metre.” …

Solar Cycle 25 update: Sun takes a post-minimum nap.

Data courtesy of Solen.info

Back in November it looked like solar cycle 25 was finally getting underway, with daily sunspot numbers peaking up to 80, and the 30 day Wolf number climbing over 30 in early December. Since then though, the Sun has relapsed into a low activity state.

This won’t come as any surprise to Talkshop followers, we’ve been saying that cycle 25 would be very low for most of the last decade. Our group research culminated in late 2013 with publication of Rick Salvador’s orbital resonance model in the journal ‘Pattern Recognition in Physics’. We provided an update on the validation of the model a while back, showing it has remained on track since publication.

8 January 2021: Europe just skirted blackout disaster

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

European leaders are too fond of their so-called climate policies to take much notice of practicalities like engineering limitations. The fragility of the power supply can only get worse under existing policies, if these warning signals are ignored.
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On 8 January 2021, the European electricity grid only just missed a large-scale collapse, says The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

Around 13:04 p.m. there was a sharp drop in frequency that could have paralysed Europe. The cause was apparently a power failure in Romania.

According to the Austrian blackout expert Herbert Saurugg, it was the second most serious major incident in the European network to date.

Why Phi – the Fibonacci resonances of the TOI-451 exoplanets

NASA’s exoplanet hunter (TESS)
[image credit: MIT]

This three-planet system has orbit periods ranging from under two to over sixteen days, obviously another very compact group. Their star is slightly smaller and less powerful than our Sun.

Planets b and c are a fraction of Jupiter’s size, but planet d is vast with a radius of over four Jupiters, or about 45 Earth radii.

Command & Control: Subsidised Wind Power Central to Britain’s Great Socialist Reset

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As COVID drains the national exchequer, plans to hose a few trillion pounds at the phantom problem of innocuous carbon dioxide molecules go almost unnoticed.

STOP THESE THINGS

As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

That adage, however, doesn’t appear to trouble Britain’s current PM, Boris Johnson, whose plan to squander a further £50,000,000,000 on subsidies and over-the-market contracts for intermittent offshore wind power beggars belief.

But that colossal crony-capitalist boondoggle, is a mere snip by comparison with the £3 trillion that he’s planning to squander on an effort to completely remove carbon dioxide gas from the British atmosphere – well, at least the kind generated by all human activity, that is.

Andrew Montford takes a look at the numbers in order to get a grip on the cost of Boris Johnson’s ‘net zero’ CO2 plan for Britain.

Honesty is needed on the huge costs of attempting “net-zero”
Conservative Home
Andrew Montford
5 December 2020

Politicians can be divided into those who like to spend big…

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Climate stats show no significant warming trend in the last 5 years, says The GWPF

But every squillionth of a degree counts for those trying to promote a human-caused climate crisis that never lives up to the hype of the computer models. In contrast with dire predictions, the change since the 1998 El Niño is nothing to write home about.
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There has been no significant warming trend for 5 years, reports The Global Warming Policy Forum.

Every year in the middle of January various organisations, The UK Met Office, NASA, NOAA, etc. release their estimates of the annual average global temperature of our planet.

This year the conclusion is that 2020 is statistically identical to 2016. Some have placed it the second whereas the Japanese Meteorological Agency has it as the third warmest of the modern era.

The overall conclusion to be drawn however is the misunderstanding of statistics used to support a predetermined opinion.

Siemens Energy in $146m bid to harvest hydrogen from offshore wind

Let’s keep pretending the climate will notice if a few hundred wind turbines are dotted around the seas. Better still, let’s make them even more expensive and unwieldy by adding some new technology that we can’t easily service as it’s miles offshore. It’s claimed that ‘brilliant minds’ will be working on this, but it doesn’t take a genius to see the flaws in the plan.
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Siemens Gamesa and Siemens Energy have today announced plans to invest €120m ($146m) in a five-year strategy to unlock the potential of harvesting green hydrogen from offshore windpower, reports Power Engineering International.

The companies are collaborating on a solution to integrate an electrolyzer into an offshore wind turbine as a single synchronized system to directly produce green hydrogen.

Over the next five years, Siemens Gamesa will invest €80m and Siemens Energy €40m in the initiative, with a view to unveiling a full-scale offshore demonstration by 2025/26.

Paris court hears landmark case on France’s [alleged] climate inaction

Political leaders are starting to find their synthetic enthusiasm for ‘fixing’ supposedly human-caused climate problems is coming back to bite them. Courts are being asked to make judgments on scientific veracity which they can’t do alone, so who will they rely on as their ‘expert’ witnesses – given that anyone selected has equally expert opponents standing by?
(Added ‘alleged’ to the original headline, to keep the right side of the law) 😆.
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A Paris court began hearing a complaint brought by NGOs backed by two million citizens on Thursday accusing the French state of failing to act to halt climate change, reports Yahoo!News.

The NGOs went to court to hold the state responsible for ecological damage and say victory would mark a symbolic step in the fight to persuade governments to do more.

An international accord signed in Paris five years ago aims to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5 degrees.

But experts say governments are far from meeting their commitments and anger is growing among the younger generation over inaction, symbolised by the campaigns of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg.

The French case is part of a mounting push from climate campaigners across the world to use courts against governments.

Noctilucent Clouds over Argentina

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The NLCs are playing a game of hide-and-seek this season, bemusing regular observers.

Spaceweather.com

Jan. 8, 2021:

They’re back. Noctilucent clouds (NLCs), recently missing, are once again circling the South Pole. And, in an unexpected twist, they’ve just appeared over Argentina as well.

“This is a very rare event,” reports Gerd Baumgarten of Germany’s Leibniz-Institute of Atmospheric Physics, whose automated cameras caught the meteoritic clouds rippling over Rio Grande, Argentina (53.8S) on Jan. 3rd:

A second camera recorded the clouds at even higher latitude: Rio Gallegos (51.6S). At this time of year, noctilucent clouds are supposed to be confined to the Antarctic–not Argentina. In the whole history of atmospheric research, NLCs have been sighted at mid-southern latitudes only a handful of times.

“Personally, I am thrilled to see NLCs in Argentina, as I had not expected them to occur so far north,” says Natalie Kaifler of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), who operates a lidar (laser radar) alongside one of Baumgarten’s…

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Enough wind power was curtailed in 2020 to power a million homes for a year

Hornsea wind project

Is anyone in UK government circles going to take this seriously, as compensation (constraint) payments spiral upwards? The perpetual mismatch between supply and demand of wind power can only get worse as more of it is built. Energy storage can’t resolve these problems, only reduce them slightly at best.
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Enough wind power was curtailed in 2020 to power a million homes for a year, reports Energy Live News.

A new report produced by Lane Clark & Peacock LLP (LCP) says primarily as a result of network constraints, last year saw a total of 3.6TWh of wind power shut off and wasted.

Congressional Democrats just admitted the US can’t afford the Green New Deal

Anyone thinking the benefit (?) would be a noticeable effect on global temperatures is going to be disappointed, as the article points out. Government-controlled climate is a fantasy, however much the exchequer is robbed.
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Democrats accidentally showed their hand by voting for a new loophole to the U.S. House of Representatives budget rules, says the Washington Examiner.

The “pay as you go” rule, which imposes a modicum of fiscal restraint by requiring spending increases to be accompanied by spending cuts to keep the national deficit from growing, now specifically excludes climate change-related bills.

In going forward with it, the House essentially admitted that we can’t afford the Green New Deal and that Democrats don’t want you to know how much it costs, either.

Carving out special treatment for big-government climate programs will give Congress license to spend with abandon on nominally eco-friendly initiatives without the slightest impact on climate change.

Biden Should Help Clean Up The Developing World’s Exotic Mining Tragedy

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Cobalt was declared as ‘reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen’ in 2016.

PA Pundits - International

By Ronald Stein ~

Reducing America’s emissions (if that’s your thing) is a major goal of President Elect Biden’s platform, but it should not be implemented by “leaking” environmental degradation and human atrocities to foreign countries that are supplying the exotic minerals and metals to support green electricity. Biden has an opportunity to follow the lead of the United Nations and Amnesty International as the efforts to achieve net zero emissions must not be built on human rights abuses or on non-existent environmental regulations in foreign countries.

Biden’s “war on pollution”, will require worldwide transparency of supply chains, and environmental and labor protection laws and standards to control the environmental degradation and humanity atrocities occurring around the world from the mining in the foreign countries that dominate the supply chain of the exotic minerals and metals to support wind turbines, solar panels and EV battery construction.

The dark side of…

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CCS can’t solve the climate crisis – new report

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This should have been obvious all along, but believers in human-caused climate warming are desperate to find ways of overcoming the intermittency of renewables.

DRILL OR DROP?

A study by climate scientists says carbon capture and storage (CCS) cannot meet the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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Removal of dairy cows would have minimal effect on ’emissions’, say researchers

Climate obsessives will have to find something else to try and bother the long-suffering public with.
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The dairy industry in the United States is massive, says AgriMarketing .

It supplies dietary requirements to the vast majority of the population.

This same industry also contributes approximately 1.58 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

A commonly suggested solution to reduce greenhouse gas output has been to reduce or eliminate this industry in favor of plant production.

A team of Virginia Tech researchers wanted to uncover the actual impact that these cows have on the environment.

Freezing weather in Asia sends energy prices soaring, catching markets off guard

Chinese icebreaker

H/T The GWPF

Had those markets fallen into a computer-modelled global warming stupor? If so, real world weather has brought a rude awakening, requiring urgent actions to get the means of heating to millions of shivering people.
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China’s coldest winter in decades meant state-owned energy giant Sinopec was desperate to unload heating fuel from a vessel headed to a northern port, yet freezing temperatures that have swept parts of Asia froze a thick sheet of ice and blocked access, says Bloomberg.

With the help of an icebreaker ship and a cannon loaded with hot water, workers spent 20 hours clearing a pathway for the tanker to dock and discharge its cargo of liquefied natural gas in Tianjin.