Electric buses from Berliner BVG have a cold problem

Image credit: bus-bild.de

An attempt to put some of the blame on a tractor protest by farmers, holding up traffic, sounds a bit weak. A solution adopted by some e-bus builders is to use fuel-powered heating systems, described here as ‘an absolute oxymoron for the electric vehicle industry’.
– – –
By 2030, Berlin wants all local public transport buses to be electric, says the Teller Report.

Passengers and drivers are already experiencing what this can mean in a cold winter.

Apparently one type of vehicle in particular causes problems.

According to information from The “Berliner Morgenpost” newspaper, a dozen of the electric buses operated by the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) are currently out of action.

Common pipistrelle bats attracted to wind turbines

Pipistrelle bat [image credit: Drahkrub @ Wikipedia]

Their activity in the danger area seems to be mainly on nights with light winds and warm temperatures, but pinpointing the most relevant sites is not straightforward.
– – –
One of the most abundant bats in Europe may be attracted to wind turbines, a new study shows.

The activity of common pipistrelle bats was monitored at 23 British wind farms and similar “control” locations close by without turbines, reports Phys.org.

Activity was around a third higher at turbines than at control locations, and two thirds of occasions with high activity were recorded at turbines rather than the controls.

The reasons for this are not clear.

Temperature of -22.9C in Braemar ‘UK’s lowest in 26 years’

Winter in Braemar [image credit: BBC]

Must be a blast from the past, before the invention of a ‘climate emergency’.
– – –
The Met Office says an overnight temperature of -22.9C recorded in Scotland is believed to be the lowest in more than 25 years, reports BBC News.

BBC weather presenter Simon King described the temperatures in Braemar, Aberdeenshire, as “incredible”.

The Met Office said it was provisionally the coldest night since 1995.

Advance Briefing for Glasgow COP 2021

.
.
Ideas like carbon capture, green hydrogen, monster batteries and so on merely tell us the obsession with a ‘net zero’ future is impossible to achieve – apart from being absurd anyway.

Science Matters

Presently the next climate Conference of Parties is scheduled for Glasgow this November, Covid allowing.  (People used to say “God willing”, or “Weather permitting”, but nowadays it’s a virus in charge.)  Actually, climate hysteria is like a seasonal sickness.  Each year a contagion of anxiety and fear is created by disinformation going viral in both legacy and social media in the run up to the autumnal COP (postponed last year due to pandemic travel restrictions).  Now that climatists have put themselves at the controls of the formidable US federal government, we can expect the public will be hugely hosed with alarms over the next few months.  Before the distress signals go full tilt, individuals need to inoculate themselves against the false claims, in order to build some herd immunity against the nonsense the media will promulgate. This post is offered as a means to that end.

Media Climate Hype is…

View original post 1,864 more words

People are driving electric vehicles less than projected

Not the latest model

Reluctance to having to waste time looking for and/or using public charging stations might be a factor, plus the old favourite of range anxiety. An EV may also be the second car in a household, in the US at least.
– – –
New data indicates that electric vehicles may not be an easy future substitute for the gasoline-powered fleet, as EVs are currently being used half as much as conventional cars, says TechXplore.

That is according to a paper published from the University of Chicago, University of California, Davis, and UC Berkeley.

As the Biden administration voices its commitment to moving the country toward electric vehicles, or EVs, and states like California work to ban the sale of new fully gas-powered cars in the next 15 years, the pledge for an EV-powered fleet leaves a question unanswered: Are consumers actually driving them?

La Nina climate cycle has peaked: UN

Of course the WMO doesn’t miss the chance to promote its ‘human-caused warming’ dogma, painting La Nina is a minor break in their imagined process.
– – –
The 2020-2021 La Nina phenomenon has passed its peak, the UN weather agency said Tuesday, but its impact on temperatures, rain and storm patterns is set to continue, reports Phys.org.

The 2020-2021 La Nina phenomenon has passed its peak, the UN weather agency said Tuesday, but its impact on temperatures, rain and storm patterns is set to continue.

La Nina refers to the large-scale cooling of surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, occurring every two to seven years.

The effect has widespread impacts on weather around the world—typically the opposite impacts to the El Nino warming phase in the Southern Oscillation cycle.

Besides the cooling effect, La Nina is usually associated with wetter conditions in some parts of the world, and drier conditions in others.

La Nina conditions have been in place since August-September 2020, according to atmospheric and oceanic indicators.

“La Nina appears to have peaked in October-November as a moderate strength event,” said the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The WMO said there was a 65 percent likelihood that La Nina will persist during February-April. The odds shift rapidly thereafter, with a 70 percent chance that the tropical Pacific will return to neutral conditions in the cycle by April-June.

“El Nino and La Nina are major drivers of the Earth’s climate system,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“But all naturally-occurring climate events now take place in the context of human-induced climate change, which is increasing global temperatures, exacerbating extreme weather, impacting seasonal rainfall patterns and complicating disaster prevention and management.”

The temporary global cooling effects of La Nina were not enough to prevent 2020 from being one of the three warmest years on record.

reports Phys.org.

Claim: Limiting warming to 2 C requires emissions reductions 80% above Paris Agreement targets

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Back in the day, anyone who said the climate of Earth could be stage-managed by humans would have been laughed off the stage, but times change. Not worth quoting much of this article, but in general it indicates some of the absurdity of current thinking on climate, based on computer models that don’t reflect reality, leading to the pursuit at vast expense of imaginary ‘solutions’.
– – –
In 2017, a widely cited study used statistical tools to model how likely the world is to meet the Paris Agreement global temperature targets, says Phys.org.

The analysis found that on current trends, the planet had only a 5% chance of staying below 2 degrees Celsius warming this century—the international climate treaty’s supposed goal.

Now, the same authors have used their tools to ask: What emissions cuts would actually be required to meet the goal of 2 C warming, considered a threshold for climate stability and climate-related risks such as excessive heat, drought, extreme weather and sea level rise?

Ned Nikolov: What Can NASA Planetary Data Tell Us about Drivers of Earth’s Climate?

Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. Has written to me with news of the presentations he made at this years AMS meeting. It’s vital we get people to understand the implications of the discoveries he and Karl Zeller have made. With our western governments jumping aboard the ‘Green New Deal’ and ‘NetZero’ bandwagons, we will need to work hard to rise awareness of viable alternative hypotheses for ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ which better explain the phenomena we can measure around us. Ned and Karl’s work should be given proper attention, because it strives for universality and general application of physics solar system wide, rather then treating Earth as a ‘special case’.

Two studies presented at the American Meteorological Society’s 34^th Conference on Climate Variability and Change in January 2021 employed a novel approach to identify the forcing of Earth’s climate at various time scales. The new method, never attempted in climate science before, relies on the fundamental premise that the laws of nature are invariant across spacetime.

Global warming may have started before industrial revolution, study says

Coral reef [image credit: Toby Hudson / Wikipedia]

We can’t have effects preceding causes, so something seems to be amiss with the ‘human-caused warming’ dogma, if this study is correct.
– – –
Studies of coral reefs in the Paracel Islands suggest that the South China Sea started warming up in 1825, at the start of the industrial revolution, according to a study by Chinese scientists.

That was the year the world’s first railway began operating in England and most ocean-going ships still used wind power, says The South China Morning Post.

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions could not fully explain such an early rise in the warming trend, they said in a peer-reviewed paper published in Quaternary Sciences on Friday.

The Paracel coral record “will fill in some important gaps in global high resolution marine environment records and help us better understand the history of environmental change in tropical waters”, said the researchers, led by Tao Shichen from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology.

Technology Tease: On The Cruel Promise of a Renewables/Hydrogen Fuelled Future

.
.
Undermining reliable electricity supply is deemed to be sound policy by many governments. Their only escape route is to be out of office before the full force of such folly becomes only too clear to all.

STOP THESE THINGS

Gormless PM struggles to grasp his only solution to RE crisis.

The wind and solar industries were built on lies, run on myth and are fuelled by subsidies, so the only way forward is more of the very same.

It took politicians and punters around a decade to cotton on to the hopeless unreliability and chaotic intermittency of solar and wind power.  Which required an altogether new approach from the rent seekers’ spin doctors.

Over the last year or two, mythical mega-batteries have been pitched as the perfect answer.

But the economics clearly don’t stack up: the biggest battery in the world – that cost taxpayers a cool $150,000,000 – sits in a sheep paddock near Jamestown in South Australia’s mid-North and would power that purportedly wind and solar ‘powered’ state for all of four minutes when the sun sets and calm weather sets in.

Hardly bang for buck, particularly…

View original post 999 more words

Mayor defends coal mine after ex-NASA scientist’s criticism

An artist’s impression of the proposed Woodhouse Colliery (Credit: West Cumbria Mining)

Another Green dreamer forgot that producing wind turbines means using lots of steel, forged in fiery furnaces. That won’t change any time soon.
– – –
THE mayor of Copeland has hit out after a former NASA scientist criticised plans to build a new coal mine in West Cumbria, reports the Whitehaven News.

In a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, leading climate scientist Dr James Hansen said that failure to stop the mine from going ahead at Whitehaven would be in “contemptuous disregard” for the future of young people and nature.

But mayor Mike Starkie called Dr Hansen’s views “completely irrelevant.”

Second Earth Trojan Asteroid Discovered

Lagrange points in the Sun–Earth system (not to scale). A small object at L4 or L5 will hold its relative position [Credit: Xander89 @ Wikipedia]

More about Lagrange points here.
– – –
A recently discovered asteroid appears to be an Earth Trojan, orbiting a gravitationally stable area with only one other known occupant, says Sky & Telescope.

Trojans are asteroids gravitationally locked to stable Lagrange points either 60° ahead (L4) or behind (L5) the planets in their orbits around the Sun. 2020 XL5 was found around the L4 point.

Massive Jupiter has more than 9,000 Trojans.

In theory, Trojan orbits would be stable around every planet except Saturn, where Jupiter’s gravity pulls them away.

Prepare For Energy Shortages, Cost Hikes And Rationing

.
.
Did they mention personal energy allowances yet?

PA Pundits International

By Larry Bell ~

Fully expect your future carbon footprints to be traced to a crime scene subject to “climate and energy justice” violations in the high tribunal of sustainability.

The prospective charges?

Such sins will include ownership and operation of an internal combustion vehicle, tampering with regulated upper or lower thermostat setting limits, and/or excessive electricity consumption based upon your maximum household square foot per occupancy allowances.

Why believe me?

Quite simply, because America’s recently controlling political party has already initiated a fast-track train wreck agenda to shut down and replace 80% of abundant and reliable hydrocarbon energy by growing the 5% currently provided by anemic, intermittent wind and solar electricity.

On top of this, the plan will vastly increase electricity demand and costs by phasing out most petroleum-fueled vehicles in favor of heavily taxpayer- and consumer-subsidized plug-in models.

When inevitable power shortages occur, rationing is most certain to follow.

View original post 906 more words

The Arctic Ocean was covered by a shelf ice and filled with freshwater

Arctic Ocean

Something new for ice age theorists to consider, in particular the ‘sudden melting’. This sequence of three sketches illustrates the processes thought to be involved (see below for explanatory caption).
– – –
The Arctic Ocean was covered by up to 900-meter-thick shelf ice and was filled entirely with freshwater at least twice in the last 150,000 years.

This surprising finding, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, is the result of long-term research by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the MARUM, says Phys.org.

With a detailed analysis of the composition of marine deposits, the scientists could demonstrate that the Arctic Ocean as well as the Nordic Seas did not contain sea-salt in at least two glacial periods.

Instead, these oceans were filled with large amounts of freshwater under a thick ice shield. This water could then be released into the North Atlantic in very short periods of time.

Such sudden freshwater inputs could explain rapid climate oscillations for which no satisfying explanation had been previously found.

Continued here.
– – –
The caption to the sequence of three sketches says:

In glacial periods with low sea levels, exchange with the Pacific was halted and exchange with the North Atlantic was extremely reduced, while the Arctic basin was still receiving freshwater input. Exchange could only occur through narrow gateways in the Greenland-Scotland-Ridge. The sequence of three sketches shows (1) a period of freshening of the Arctic Ocean followed by (2) the release of freshwater to the North Atlantic, when saline water entered the Arctic Ocean and (3) sudden melting of the Arctic ice sheet upon contact with the relatively warm and salty Atlantic water. Credit: Alfred Wegener Institute/Martin Künsting

France found guilty of climate inaction in ‘historic victory’

‘Hoist by their own petard’ springs to mind. French courts are now willing to hear from ‘direct victims of climate change’. How they might define climate change remains to be seen, as the insanity gets further embedded into the system.
– – –
A court in Paris has ruled that France’s government is guilty of climate inaction in a ground-breaking legal case, reports Euronews.

The decision comes after a group of NGOs, with the support of two million citizens, filed a lawsuit against the French government for failing to meet the country’s commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

The legal claim was hailed as the “L’Affaire du siècle” or “the case of the century” by activists, who first started the dispute in March 2019.

MET Office global temperature prediction falls 0.35C in 5 years.

Back in 2016, the UK MET Office’s median projection to the start of 2021 forecast a global temperature temperature anomaly of 1.4C above their 1850-1900 “Pre-Industrial” baseline. Their recently published five year model projection (rightmost blue blob on graph), shows a 2021 median anomaly 0.35C lower, at 1.05C.

Their HADcruT 4GL temperature time series (data since 2016 added in red on graph) shows a linear trend of +0.09C/semi-decade for the last 50 years. CO2, by far the biggest forcing in their model, is still rising in lockstep with the 50 year temperature trend. What could have caused this remarkable downward step change in their model output?

Northeastern US digging out from not-quite-record snowstorm

Credit: CBC News

Not your run-of-the-mill winter snowfall, only six weeks after a similar event described by the BBC as ‘record-breaking’ .
– – –
People of the northeastern U.S. shoveled themselves out Tuesday after a two-day snowstorm that shut down public transport, canceled flights and closed coronavirus vaccination sites, reports Phys.org.

Some bands of snow were still moving through parts of Maine and Pennsylvania in the morning, but the worst was over, with more than 30 inches (76 centimeters) in parts of New Jersey and just a few inches in Boston.

UK weather: January 2021 was coldest in 10 years with more wintry conditions this week

Credit: Met Office

January 2010 was itself described as the UK’s coldest January since 1987. All three of these cold months occurred within a year or so of a solar minimum (end of a solar cycle). Cold weather and snow are continuing in some parts today, but not on a par with the current major US snowstorm.
– – –
The average temperature last month was 2.2C – the coldest January since 2010, Sky News reports.

This makes it the coldest January since 2010, when the average was 0.9C.

The coldest January on record was 1963, when conditions averaged -1.9C.

Unmatched dust storms raged over Western Europe during Ice age maximum

Image credit: ScienceDaily

This has echoes of the ice age dust/albedo theory – with no CO2 feedbacks – proposed by Ralph Ellis a few years ago. The article concludes: ‘The result thus has the potential to aid the understanding of the abrupt warming and cooling periods during the ice ages called Dansgaard/Oeschger events which bear the marks of climate tipping points.’
– – –
Every late winter and early spring, huge dust storms swirled across the bare and frozen landscapes of Europe during the coldest periods of the latest ice age, says Phys.org.

These paleo-tempests, which are seldom matched in our modern climate frequently covered Western Europe in some of the thickest layers of ice-age dust found anywhere previously on Earth.

This is demonstrated by a series of new estimates of the sedimentation and accumulation rates of European loess layers obtained by Senior Research Scientist Denis-Didier Rousseau from Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, and colleagues.

The work, which is published in Quaternary Science Reviews is part of the TiPES project on tipping points in the Earth system, coordinated by The University of Copenhagen.

In the study Denis-Didier Rousseau and colleagues reinterpreted layers in loess from Nussloch, Germany.

Loess is a fine-silt-sized earth type found all over the world. It mainly consists of aeolian sediments, which are materials transported by the wind from dry areas without vegetation such as deserts of any type, moraines, or dried-out river beds.

Within the aeolian sediments, darker layers of paleosol alternate within the loess layers. Every layer in the loess represents a shift in climatic conditions.

How the UK Climate Assembly manufactured consent

No coincidence that Ireland and France also held similar climate charades around the same time. All part of the promotion of useless ‘net zero’ ideology.
– – –
This stage-managed Assembly is a sham, says Spiked-online.

There is no democratic mandate for extreme climate policies.

As I have been pointing out for over a decade here on spiked, the political consensus on climate change is not shared by the public – or, at best, the public’s appetite for climate policy has not been tested democratically.

And governments are well aware of this, too.