Asian coal plant drive alarms climate alarmists

Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]

Prosperity before flaky climate theories for Asia’s present and future industrial powerhouse economies. Once again we’re sold the myth of ‘cheaper renewables’, which always need subsidies — even for being turned off.
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Five Asian countries are responsible for 80 percent of new coal power stations planned worldwide, says Phys.org, with the projects threatening goals to fight the climate crisis, a report warned Wednesday.

China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are planning to build more than 600 coal plants, think-tank Carbon Tracker said.

The stations will be able to generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy—equivalent to around the entire electricity generating capacity of Japan.

Why ‘nuclear batteries’ offer a new approach to carbon-free energy

Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

‘Plug and play’ nuclear power in a box, or container, is the basic idea.
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We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering. TechXplore reporting.

Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers gave way to the widely distributed PCs of today, a new generation of relatively tiny and inexpensive factory-built reactors, designed for autonomous plug-and-play operation similar to plugging in an oversized battery, is on the horizon, they say.

These proposed systems could provide heat for industrial processes or electricity for a military base or a neighborhood, run unattended for five to 10 years, and then be trucked back to the factory for refurbishment.

Amazon hydropower plant contributes significant greenhouse emissions: study

Impression of Belo Monte dam

A case of nature not conforming to expectations. This could apply to numerous such schemes, giving climate alarmists yet another conundrum to wrestle with.
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When climate researcher Dailson Bertassoli went to measure greenhouse gas emissions at the Belo Monte hydropower plant in Brazil, the first thing he noticed was the bubbles, says Phys.org.

Developers have built hundreds of hydroelectric plants in the Amazon basin to take advantage of the allegedly “green” energy generated by its complex of rivers.

But climate researchers now know hydropower is not as good for the environment as once assumed. Though no fossil fuels are burned, the reservoirs release millions of tons of methane and carbon dioxide as vegetation decays underwater.

Someone leaked the next IPCC report

It’s the usual miserablist cacophony about tipping points and bleak futures by the sound of it. We’ve all heard this tune many times before, but still none of the dire predictions have occurred as climate models persistently over-estimate actual temperatures by often embarrassingly wide margins. This in turn leads to the usual lurid crystal ball gazing into some inevitably grim future the doomsters have dreamed up, in the style of plot ideas for a far-fetched Hollywood disaster movie. Yawn.
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A draft report from the world’s peak body on climate change, leaked to a global news agency, has sparked concern according to Science Alert — but the dire warnings the report details shouldn’t come as a surprise, experts say.

The draft report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was obtained by Agence France-Presse (AFP), a global news agency headquartered in Paris.

Huge Comet Discovery

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It’s really big, but its vast orbit won’t bring it past Earth.

Spaceweather.com

June 23, 2021: Astronomers have just discovered a comet so big, it might actually be a minor planet. The object is named 2014 UN271. Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein found it in archival images from the Dark Energy Survey. It appears to be about 100 km wide, 2 or 3 times bigger than record-breaking Comet Hale-Bopp of the 1990s.

Above: A discovery image and orbit of huge Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein

Now for the bad news. Although 2014 UN271 is falling toward the sun, we may never see it with our naked eyes. At closest approach in early 2031, the behemoth comet will be just outside the orbit of Saturn, too far for naked-eye viewing. Some astronomers are estimating a maximum brightness near magnitude +17, about the same as Pluto’s moon Charon.

It’s still an amazing discovery. 2014 UN271 has an extremely elongated orbit stretching from ~the neighborhood of…

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Climate change: UK Government’s own advisers say it’s failing to deliver change fast enough – just as they always say

Unpopular policies are hard to implement, as any politician knows. Having no convincing evidence that trace gases in the atmosphere are a major, or even any, kind of climate issue doesn’t help persuade the public of a need for drastic measures and financial pain either.
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The government is failing to deliver on promises to dramatically cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to its own climate advisers, says Sky News.

They warn ministers need to rapidly step up action, with every month of delay making it harder to meet legal obligations to reach net zero by 2050.

In a series of report cards on the government’s progress over the last year, the Climate Change Committee says that despite setting the right targets there’s still no detailed plan on how to replace millions of boilers, encourage people to drive electric and plant acres of trees.

A novel energy storage solution featuring pipes and anchors

Image credit: buoyant-energy.com

That’s the headline, but is ‘novel’ its only merit? Buoyant Energy is described as promising but then, aren’t they all? Energy storage on a meaningful scale seems as far away as ever, having rejected the obvious ones: coal, oil, gas and sometimes even nuclear.
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What do pipes and anchors have to do with storing energy? More than you might think, suggests TechXplore.

A new IIASA-led study explored the potential of a lesser known, but promising sustainable energy storage system called Buoyancy Energy Storage.

There is general consensus that renewable energy sources will play an important role in ensuring a healthier and more sustainable future for the planet and its people, and many countries are indeed already seeing such technologies displacing “dirty” fossil fuels in the power sector in an effort to lower emissions. [Talkshop comment – CO2 emissions have absolutely nothing to do with dirt].

The biggest problem with renewable energy sources, however, is that power supply is intermittent, meaning that the energy output at any given time does not necessarily meet the demand at that time.

‘Giant arc’ stretching 3.3 billion light-years across the cosmos shouldn’t exist

The Milky Way in the night sky over Black Rock Desert, Nevada [image credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikipedia]

Not only that, but it’s likely ‘rotating on a scale never seen before’, says Phys.org. ‘How the angular momentum responsible for the rotation is generated in a cosmological context is one of the key unsolved problems of cosmology.’
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How big is too big? – asks Space.com.

A newly discovered crescent of galaxies spanning 3.3 billion light-years is among the largest known structures in the universe and challenges some of astronomers’ most basic assumptions about the cosmos.

The epic arrangement, called the Giant Arc, consists of galaxies, galactic clusters, and lots of gas and dust.

It is located 9.2 billion light-years away and stretches across roughly a 15th of the observable universe.

Zero-emission ‘Seagliders’ could cross Channel in 40 minutes

Image credit: Brittany Ferries

Battery weight is always a problem for electric-powered flight. No reason to think this type of machine would be any different, meaning the economics of the idea remain questionable.
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Ferry operator Brittany Ferries has announced that it will work with US-based start-up Regent Craft to develop sea-skimming “flying ferries” that could reduce sailing times between England and France to as little as 40 minutes, says E&T.

Brittany Ferries described the proposed battery-powered vehicle as combining “the convenience of passenger ferries with the comfort of hydrofoils, the aerodynamic efficiency of hovercraft and the speed of aircraft”.

It resembles a small aircraft which skims the surface of the sea. It uses the wing-in ground effect, which would involve riding on a cushion of air trapped between a wing and the water surface; this is similar to how a hovercraft supports itself as it moves.

The 27.5-million-year cycle of geological activity

Scientists previously proposed 26 million year cycles of mass extinctions, but this appears to correct the period. They suggest ‘cycles of activity in the Earth’s interior’ could be behind their new period, but then say: ‘However, similar cycles in the Earth’s orbit in space might also be pacing these events.’ Their study also says ‘a strong secondary signal occurs at a period 8.9 Myr’.
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Geologic activity on Earth appears to follow a 27.5-million-year cycle, giving the planet a ‘pulse,’ according to a new study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers. Phys.org reporting.

“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common cycle, suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random,” said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University’s Department of Biology, as well as the study’s lead author.

Over the past five decades, researchers have proposed cycles of major geological events—including volcanic activity and mass extinctions on land and sea—ranging from roughly 26 to 36 million years.

But early work on these correlations in the geological record was hampered by limitations in the age-dating of geologic events, which prevented scientists from conducting quantitative investigations.

On yer bike, commuters! Electric car obsession impedes race to net zero

E-bikes

Electric bike, aka ‘active travel’, that is. That’s the proposed option for those who don’t want to walk, don’t have access to an electric car, or do but hit recharge problems, in the wondrous(?) net zero future. The real obsession is that with minor trace gases in the atmosphere, leading to all sorts of improbable and foolish policy ideas and decisions.
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Globally, only one in 50 new cars were fully electric in 2020, and one in 14 in the UK, says TechXplore.

Sounds impressive, but even if all new cars sold were electric, it would still take 15-20 years to replace the world’s fossil fuel car fleet.

The emission savings from replacing all those internal combustion engines with zero-carbon alternatives will not feed in fast enough to make the necessary difference in the time we can spare: the next five years [Talkshop comment – says who?].

Tackling the climate and air pollution requires curbing all motorized transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible.

The sun’s clock: New calculations support and expand planetary hypothesis

The Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory has been looking at some of the Talkshop-featured PRP papers, in particular those by Ian Wilson and Jan-Erik Solheim, plus others by names familiar to many Talkshoppers (Sharp, McCracken, Abreu, Scafetta, McIntosh etc.). It likes what it finds, describing Ian Wilson’s 2013 PRP paper, from which they cite his 11.07 and 193-year solar-planetary periods, as ‘highly instructive and recommendable’ (available via the PRP link above, or the one at the top of the Talkshop home page, or here). This is all something of a contrast to the original publishers, who washed their hands of all the PRP papers under pressure from the IPCC and/or its influential supporters. We may not agree entirely with all their interpretations of the data, but their approach is refreshing. 
H/T Lori
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Solar physicists around the world have long been searching for satisfactory explanations for the sun’s many cyclical, overlapping activity fluctuations, says Phys.org.

In addition to the most famous, approximately 11-year “Schwabe cycle”, the sun also exhibits longer fluctuations, ranging from hundreds to thousands of years.

It follows, for example, the “Gleissberg cycle” (about 85 years), the “Suess-de Vries cycle” (about 200 years) and the quasi-cycle of “Bond events” (about 1500 years), each named after their discoverers.

It is undisputed that the solar magnetic field controls these activity fluctuations.

Ocean circulation is key to understanding uncertainties in climate change predictions

A portion of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [image credit: R. Curry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution @ Wikipedia]

Widely differing climate models are supposed to be a reliable guide to the future? Clearly not. Here the uncertainty gets investigated, and pinned on a phenomenon that was recently claimed by Mann et al not to exist. Of course all these models make the assumption that carbon dioxide at a tiny 0.04% of the atmosphere is a key variable of concern, despite all the other variability in the climate system that they have to wrestle with.
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Thirty state-of-the-art IPCC-climate models predict dramatically different climates for the Northern Hemisphere, especially Europe, says Phys.org.

An analysis of the range of responses now reveals that the differences are mostly down to the individual model’s simulations of changes to the North Atlantic ocean currents and not only—as normally assumed—atmospheric changes.

The work, by Katinka Bellomo, National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and colleagues is published today in Nature Communications and is part of the European science collaboration, TiPES, coordinated by the University of Copenhagen.

All climate models vary in the details. Variables such as atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, temperature gradients, sea surface temperatures, and many more are tuned to interact slightly differently for every model. This means that the predictions of the many models also vary.

Solar wind temperature mystery

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

Expecting a variable, researchers found a constant.
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From traversing sand dunes in the Sahara Desert to keeping watch for polar bears in the Arctic, a group of solar scientists known as the “Solar Wind Sherpas” led by Shadia Habbal, have traveled to the ends of the Earth to scientifically observe total solar eclipses—the fleeting moments when the Moon completely blocks the Sun, temporarily turning day into night.

With the images, they’ve uncovered a surprising finding about the Sun’s wind and its wispy outer atmosphere—the corona—which is only visible in its entirety during an eclipse, says NASA (via Phys.org).

From more than a decade’s worth of total eclipse observations taken around the world, the team noticed that the corona maintains a fairly constant temperature, despite dynamical changes to the region that occur on an 11-year rotation known as the solar cycle.

Similarly, the solar wind—the steady stream of particles the Sun releases from the corona out across the solar system—matches that same temperature.

Britain faces power cuts as electricity begins to run everything from cars to boilers, say ‘climate change advisers’

[credit: green lantern electric]

‘What a surprise’, said no-one. Cue vague waffle about facing the issues, mainly caused by ditching reliable (compared to renewables) on-demand electricity generation from coal and gas.
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Britain faces catastrophic power cuts because of an increasing reliance on electricity to run everything from cars to home boilers, the Committee on Climate Change has warned. The Telegraph reporting.

Decarbonisation plans, which involve switching transport and heating away from petrol and gas, will mean outages in the future have a greater impact, the Government’s independent advisory committee on climate change has said, as it urged the Government to make sure the system could withstand extreme weather.

Dutch court gets climate science wrong

Credit: planetsave.com

Embarrassing. Whatever the true science may be, it’s not what the court claimed. Is an appeal against their verdict in order?
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A recent Dutch Court decision is getting international attention because it commands climate action.

The case itself is like angels on a pinhead, so of little interest, says David Wojick @ CFACT.

Shell Oil proposed to cut CO2 emissions by 40% and the Court made it 45%, both targets being stupid. The real concern is the precedent of Courts making climate policy, so this decision is worth looking at.

Turns out the Court’s version of the science is amazingly bad.

Climate referendum: Swiss reject higher carbon taxes

Credit: myswitzerland.com

Democratic accountability can be a menace to climate obsessives. Suppressing and ignoring widespread disagreeable — to them — views is more their style. Looking at you, G7 leaders.
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Swiss voters have rejected legislation at the heart of the country’s strategy to abide by the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, reports Swiss Info (via The GWPF).

The CO2 law was turned down on Sunday by 51.6% of voters. The negative outcome represents a major upset in the tiny nation that is disproportionately affected by climate change [Talkshop comment – says who?].

Switzerland’s temperatures are rising at about twice the pace of the global average [Talkshop comment – says who?] and its Alpine glaciers risk disappearing by the end of the century [Talkshop comment – empty waffle].

Can the world stop investing in oil & gas?

By the Ageing Tiger

The International Energy Agency was set up in 1974 to ensure the security of oil supplies, if you are old enough, like me, you might remember the Arab oil embargo, queues at petrol stations and rocketing oil prices. So, if the IEA come out and say “that no new oil and natural gas fields are needed in the net zero pathway”, then that must be true and all of us oil and gas professionals can hang up our boots and head to the scrapheap.

When the IEA was formed, it was in response to the emergence of OPEC. When OPEC flexed its muscles in the early 1970’s the cartel supplied over 50% of the world’s oil, they had massive market power.

By the time I was moving to Aberdeen to work offshore on Forties, you see for a brief period I was a genuine North Sea Tiger, OPEC supplied less than 30% of the world’s oil. Oil prices which had been over $100/bbl in 2021 money, duly collapsed and it wasn’t until US shale oil started to chip away at OPEC’s market share that anyone really paid attention to OPEC again.

Deep ‘decarbonization’ by 2050 currently not plausible, study finds

Some climate theories aren’t plausible either, including the one that thinks that atmospheric goings-on are more important than ocean dynamics like El Niño and La Niña. But the fear show must go on.
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Today the Hamburg-based Cluster of Excellence “Climate, Climatic Change, and Society” (CLICCS) publishes a new, essential study on climate futures, reports Phys.org.

The study represents the first systematic attempt to investigate whether a climate future with net-zero carbon emissions is not only possible but also plausible.

The authors examine plausibility from a technical-economic perspective, but also with regard to the societal changes necessary for such a future.

They conclude that deep decarbonization by 2050 is currently not plausible—the current efforts to bring about societal transformation need to be far more ambitious.

The Termination Event

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Testable science ideas here. What’s not to like?

“What can I say?” laughs McIntosh. “We’re heretics!”

H/T g2

Spaceweather.com

June 10, 2021: Something big may be about to happen on the sun. “We call it the Termination Event,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), “and it’s very, very close to happening.”

If you’ve never heard of the Termination Event, you’re not alone.  Many researchers have never heard of it either. It’s a relatively new idea in solar physics championed by McIntosh and colleague Bob Leamon of the University of Maryland – Baltimore County. According to the two scientists, vast bands of magnetism are drifting across the surface of the sun. When oppositely-charged bands collide at the equator, they annihilate (or “terminate”). There’s no explosion; this is magnetism, not anti-matter. Nevertheless, the Termination Event is a big deal. It can kickstart the next solar cycle into a higher gear.

Above: Oppositely charged magnetic bands (red and blue) march toward the sun’s equator…

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