Boris Johnson flies to green G7 summit in private jet

Enough said.
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The decision to take a 250-mile flight instead of more sustainable forms of transport has drawn widespread criticism on social media platforms, reports Energy Live News.

University of East Anglia ‘Climategate’ scandal to be turned into film

Here’s the BBC to tell us it wasn’t a scandal after all, as the scientists who admitted behaving badly by ignoring Freedom of Information requests, and other suspect practices, were really just innocent victims of ‘cyber terrorism’ and malevolent climate sceptics. What a surprise – not.
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The Crown’s Jason Watkins will star as a professor who found himself at the centre of a media storm, says BBC News.

Hackers stole thousands of emails and documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Norwich in 2009.

Line of Duty actor Jason Watkins is to star in The Trick playing climate change scientist Prof Philip Jones.

Watkins said it was a “privilege to play the brilliant scientist… whose own world was so threatened”.

Heat pumps may cause dangerous water pollution, report warns

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]

Forcing householders to replace gas boilers that release the harmless and vital trace gas CO2 with expensive heat pumps, to conform to curious and unproven climate-related ideas, may be an even worse plan than originally thought.
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Heat pumps are widely regarded as a silver bullet to the problem of decarbonising heating systems, but a new report from the German government suggests the refrigerants used in many units may have serious environmental impacts, particularly on water, says Renew Economy.

The findings do not spell doom for the heat pump revolution many climate activists want to see, but they would require a significant overhaul in the way many air conditioner and heat pump manufacturers build their systems.

The report, the result of a two year study by the German Environment Agency, concerns the use of halogenated refrigerants – known in the English speaking world as hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs) – in air conditioners and heat pumps.

It concludes that their use is already adding significant amounts trifluoroacetate acid (TFA) to the atmosphere, contaminating rain and water supplies, and potentially causing health problems such as liver and kidney damage.

International Energy Agency’s Green Energy Fantasy Is A Hoot

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A hoot, yes – but so far the laughs are on us if we’re in a country pushing the far-fetched nonsense of fearsome human-caused warming.

PA Pundits International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

Looking for laughs? The International Energy Agency has produced a laugh filled report, grandly titled: “Net Zero by 2050: A roadmap for the global energy system“. Redesigning the global energy system. My, oh my. Below are a few highlights, out of many.

To begin with it is not a roadmap, as it does not tell us how to get there. In fact you cannot get there from here, which makes their there very amusing. This is perhaps the most elaborate net zero fantasy concocted so far.

IEA Executive Director Faith Birol explains where the fantasy comes from: “…combining for the first time the complex models of our two flagship series, the World Energy Outlook and Energy Technology Perspectives.”

So two, not just one, complex computer models, that have never before been combined. I feel better already. Instead of the world energy outlook, it is IEA’s…

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Aquatic fungus creates a fast track for carbon dioxide, say researchers

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

Proving once again how massively important carbon dioxide is to nature, via photosynthesis.
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Tiny algae in Earth’s oceans and lakes take in sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn them into sugars that sustain the rest of the aquatic food web, gobbling up about as much carbon as all the world’s trees and plants combined, says Phys.org.

New research shows a crucial piece has been missing from the conventional explanation for what happens between this first “fixing” of CO2 into phytoplankton and its eventual release to the atmosphere or descent to depths where it no longer contributes to global warming. [Talkshop comment – evidence-free assertion.]

The missing piece? Fungus.

Noctilucent Cloud Season is Getting Longer

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The obvious question being – why?

Spaceweather.com

June 3, 2021: No it’s not your imagination. Noctilucent cloud (NLC) season really is getting longer. New data from NASA’s AIM spacecraft show the first NLCs of summer have been trending earlier since the spacecraft was launched in 2007. This plot prepared by Cora Randall of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics shows the change:

Each little blue box shows the day of year when AIM’s CIPS sensor detected the first NLC of northern summer. “The season appears to be starting earlier, which is making it longer by about 5 days,” says Randall.

Interestingly, the season is not also ending later; it still stops in August. Nevertheless, the early start is giving sky watchers an extra 5 days a year of noctilucent clouds.

The first NLCs of the season typically appear inside the Arctic Circle. Then, they spin outward to lower latitudes–a process which is…

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Firms bidding for major UK public sector contracts must sign net zero pledge

CO2 is not pollution

Yet another absurdity dreamed up from the foolish demonisation of a harmless trace gas essential to nature’s survival.
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Businesses bidding for major UK Government contracts will have to pledge to work towards a net zero carbon output by 2050 in order to be considered, in what is being touted as a world-first move, reports the Evening Standard.

The Cabinet Office said firms will have to publish “clear and credible carbon reduction” plans before seeking to become public sector contractors.

Officials said the measures, announced to coincide with World Environment Day on Saturday and coming before the Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow in November, makes the UK Government the first in the world to put such a requirement in place.

Are wind farms slowing each other down?

German Chancellor Merkel surveys an offshore wind site [image credit: evwind.es]

Wind ‘farms’ are allergic to each other it seems, sometimes leading to sizable drops in output. Awkward when space isn’t unlimited, some of the best sites are already taken, and the plan is to multiply the existing fleets. Weather dependency is even greater than expected.
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The expansion of wind energy in the German Bight and the Baltic Sea has accelerated enormously in recent years, TechXplore.

The first systems went into operation in 2008. Today, wind turbines with an output of around 8,000 megawatts operate in German waters, which corresponds to around eight nuclear power plants.

But space is limited. For this reason, wind farms are sometimes built very close to one another.

A team led by Dr. Naveed Akhtar from Helmholtz Zentrum Hereon has found that wind speeds at the downstream windfarm are significantly slowed down.

NYTimes and Nature falsely claim one-third of heatwaves due to climate change

Credit: airbus.com

As this article says: ‘The wealth of scientific evidence points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that cold, not heat, kills.’ But anything alarmist, however tenuous, seems to get a free pass from so-called ‘fact checkers’ who want humans to be blamed for any real or imagined climate variation.
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Recently, there have been a number of media stories claiming modest global warming has caused more than a third of heat-related death around the world between 1991 and 2018, says H. Sterling Burnett @ Climate Change Dispatch.

These stories all reference a single study published in Nature Climate Change to support their claims. This study is purely speculative, based on climate model projections and epidemiological studies that don’t control for significant confounding factors.

By contrast, numerous studies show, a modestly warmer world should result in fewer temperature-related deaths overall, not more.

Energy storage: a major ‘clean energy hurdle’

Credit: impactlab.net

Like ‘free beer tomorrow’, projects such as this one may sound good to some, but does the promised tomorrow ever arrive? So far, no. Not even close. And equating so-called ‘clean tech’ with the climate is yet another obviously absurd media fantasy. Solving the issue by 2030 is the target — good luck with that. Of course gas, coal and oil are their own energy storage, but don’t mention those any more.
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A major project aims to overcome a barrier to electricity grids wholly supplied by renewable energy, says BBC News.

Output from wind turbines varies because wind speeds fluctuate; output from solar cells changes according to cloud cover and other factors [Talkshop comment – such as 50% darkness per year].

This is called variability, and overcoming it is crucial for increasing the share of renewables on the grid.

Burger wars! UK Cabinet split over carbon tax on imported meat

Politicians must be so brainwashed and confused about climate science if they really think carbon dioxide, which is essential to plants and vegetation, is polluting something or other. Result: they talk nonsense in public all the time about ‘carbon’.
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GEORGE Eustice sparked a Cabinet war today by threatening to slap a carbon tax on foreign meat, says The Sun / GWPF.

The Environment Secretary’s move could mean a levy being put on burgers from polluting (sic) mega-farms in Australia.

Mr Eustice has been locked in a bitter battle with International Trade Secretary Liz Truss over the phasing out of meat tariffs on imports from Oz in the looming major trade deal.

But he said the meat tax could help protect British farmers from cheap imports. [Talkshop comment: nothing to do with his phony pollution claims then.]

Newly discovered African ‘climate seesaw’ drove human evolution

Generalized Walker Circulation (December-February) during ENSO-neutral conditions. Convection associated with rising branches of the Walker Circulation is found over the Maritime continent, northern South America, and eastern Africa. [Credit: NOAA Climate.gov — drawing by Fiona Martin]

El Niño and 100,000 year glaciation/climate cycles feature prominently in this research. The Walker circulation has been described as ENSO’s atmospheric buddy.
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While it is widely accepted that climate change drove the evolution of our species in Africa, the exact character of that climate change and its impacts are not well understood, says Phys.org.

Glacial-interglacial cycles strongly impact patterns of climate change in many parts of the world, and were also assumed to regulate environmental changes in Africa during the critical period of human evolution over the last ~1 million years.

The ecosystem changes driven by these glacial cycles are thought to have stimulated the evolution and dispersal of early humans.

A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) this week challenges this view.