Old-school data suggests hurricanes in the Atlantic are not more frequent than in the past

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Quote: ‘No evidence’. Not more intense either. Reports claiming otherwise were greatly exaggerated or at least ill-informed, it seems (as well as being frequent, and intensely irritating). Climate alarmists will not be amused.
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Researchers affiliated with several institutions in the United States have determined that the increase in the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic over the past several years is not related to global warming, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

They suggest instead, in their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, that it is simply reflective of natural variable weather patterns.

Over the past several decades, scientists studying satellite data have found that the number of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean has been increasing.

Many in the field have suggested that this is due to the impact of global warming.

Greenland ditches oil exploration efforts after 50 years of failure

Kvanefjeld, Greenland [image credit: polarconnection.org]

Not too hard to give up what you haven’t got anyway? Its leaders now favour renewables, but with up to twenty hours of darkness in December they won’t get much winter help from solar power. At a guess they won’t be dispensing with their diesel generators any time soon.
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Greenland is abandoning its ambition of 50 years of becoming an oil-producing nation, suspending its oil exploration strategy because of environmental and climate concerns, reports OilPrice.com.

Greenland, an autonomous territory part of Denmark, has been trying to find oil reserves for 50 years, without success, and it now considers that the climate concerns are far greater than the potential benefits of becoming an oil producer, the government of Greenland says.

According to one estimate from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Greenland’s offshore area, East Greenland Rift Basins Province, likely contains a mean estimate of 31.4 billion of barrels equivalent of oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids.

Science failed to predict flood and heat intensity, needs better computer – BBC

Weather forecasting technology

Maybe they need better ideas, not just more expensive modelling gear run by the same climate obsessives pushing worn-out theories that have never worked. Sales talk of ‘delivering the quantum leap’ sounds a bit thin after decades of posing as masters of climate understanding.
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Top climate scientists have admitted they failed to predict the intensity of the German floods and the North American heat dome, says BBC News.

They’ve correctly warned over decades that a fast-warming climate would bring worse bursts of rain and more damaging heatwaves.

But they say their computers are not powerful enough to accurately project the severity of those extremes.

They want governments to spend big on a shared climate super-computer.

Renewable production not keeping pace with new demand

The amount of additional electricity required worldwide is more than any existing increase in output from renewables. As value-for-money fossil fuels – coal and gas mostly – fill the breach as it were, ‘decarbonisation’ is in effect going negative (if it was ever doing anything else). Let COP26 delegates chew on such ‘challenges’ as they’re called, in Glasgow later this year.
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The planet’s electricity demand is expected to rebound strongly this year and next after falling by around 1% in 2020, according to a new publication from the International Energy Agency.

Released on Thursday, the IEA’s electricity market report predicts that global demand for electricity will increase by nearly 5% in 2021 and 4% in 2022 as economies around the world seek to recover from effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, says France24.

The report from the Paris-based organization notes that although electricity production from renewable energies “continues to grow strongly” – it is expected to increase by 8% this year and more than 6% in 2022 – it does not, cannot meet the growing demand.

Dutch province unveils solar bicycle path, forgetting it’s not on the equator

Cycling is popular in the Netherlands [image credit: expatica.com]

There’s a reason why fixed solar panels should be, and usually are, angled at about 35-40 degrees in northern Europe. It’s called the optimal tilt angle. This cycle path with panels flat on the ground is so simple-minded it’s embarrassing, or ought to be.
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Authorities in a central Dutch province opened what they are billing as the world’s longest solar bicycle path Wednesday, mixing sustainable energy with emission-free travel, says TechXplore.

Tree rings show record of newly identified extreme solar activity event

Solar flare erupting from a sunspot [image credit: space.com]

Using trees as solar cycle and cosmic ray detectors here. The researchers say: ‘Notably, other evidence suggests that the sun was also undergoing a decades-long period of increasing activity.’ We may ask, with a view to the current era: how often does that happen, and why?
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The sun constantly emits a stream of energetic particles, some of which reach Earth, says Phys.org.

The density and energy of this stream form the basis of space weather, which can interfere with the operation of satellites and other spacecraft.

A key unresolved question in the field is the frequency with which the sun emits bursts of energetic particles strong enough to disable or destroy space-based electronics.

One promising avenue for determining the rate of such events is the dendrochronological record. This approach relies on the process by which a solar energetic particle (SEP) strikes the atmosphere, causing a chain reaction that results in the production of an atom of carbon-14.

Rats! Tesla won’t pay for rodent damage to cars

Any Teslas round here? [image credit: Edal Anton Lefterov @ Wikipedia]

A bit of light relief perhaps, unless you’re already one of the victims or could soon become one. Are electric cars more appealing than combustion-engined types to hungry rodents? Check those brake cables.
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Elon Musk may have a rat problem, says The New York Post.

Fans of the South African billionaire’s electric cars say rats, mice and rodents are chomping down on their Teslas.

And despite having dropped tens of thousands of dollars to buy the pricey vehicles, Tesla refuses to cover the damage.

Net zero must be fair, say MPs – some hope

Let’s see if the public can find fairness in being forced to switch to electric cars and pay a small fortune to change their home heating systems, when the time comes – which it quite soon will. All in the name of so-called ‘decarbonisation’ which won’t achieve anything positive for the climate anyway, but suits the aims of the catastrophists.

Any fairness to be found here: ‘The extra demand for electricity will overwhelm most domestic fuses, thus requiring homeowners to install new ones, as well as circuit-breakers and new distribution boards. Most will also have to rewire between their main fuse and the distribution network. In urban areas, where most electrical cabling is underground, this will involve paying for a trench to be dug between the home and the feeder circuits in the street.’? [Source: The Hidden Cost of Net Zero: Rewiring the UK].
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The government is criticised over its ‘insufficient’ public engagement practices around net zero, reports Energy Live News.

Fairness should underpin the UK’s transition to net zero.

That’s one of the recommendations of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Committee which urges the government to prioritise the Net Zero Review and Net Zero Strategy to increase engagement with the public, businesses and industry.

In its report named ‘Climate Assembly UK: Where are we now’, the committee suggests the government’s public engagement practices are insufficient.

UK’s giant battery ‘farms’ spark fears of explosions even worse than the Beirut port blast

Image credit: energy-storage.news

The report says these batteries are not covered by the Control of Major Accident Hazards regulations, meaning they’re now popping up all over the place, sometimes near people’s homes. Any problems however serious have to be faced by the local fire services. Lithium-ion storage battery fires are far from rare, as well as notoriously violent, fiercely hot and difficult to deal with.
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The first thing you notice is the noise – a strange, low-octave hum growing louder as you approach across the fields, says the Mail on Sunday (via The GWPF).

It’s coming from a group of bland metal cabins sitting on land that was once used to grow wheat and barley.

Yet these new agricultural buildings are nothing to do with food production. Instead, they contain huge batteries storing electricity for the National Grid – a new form of crop for farmers scrambling to cash in on the ‘green’ energy revolution.

And, according to a troubling new report from leading physicists, these vast batteries amount to electrical bombs with the force of many hundreds of tons of TNT.

Schwarzenegger slams climate alarmism: No one’s going to invest in a movie that has no hope

Credit: Robertson / The GWPF

Replace ‘has no hope’ with ‘makes no sense’, then he’s getting closer to the reality that eluded the doomsters long ago, if they were ever anywhere near it at all.
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Environmentalists’ constant hyperbolic predictions of apocalyptic doom have left the public tuned out and resigned, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger told his fellow climate warriors at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna on Thursday. CNSNews reporting.

“No one is going to invest huge sums of money in a movie where there is no hope,” Schwarzenegger said, warning that people won’t invest in the climate movement if they are bombarded with nothing but messages of doom – ranging from famine and war to human extinction:

GWPF welcomes Boris Johnson’s last-minute delay of gas boiler ban

Domestic gas central heating boiler

Government getting cold feet? Looks like it, after MP Steve Baker warned ‘if ministers don’t obtain the consent of the public for Net Zero’ the result could be a public revolt leading to ‘utter political fiasco’. Climate fear isn’t the weapon they seem to think it is.
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The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) has welcomed the decision by Boris Johnson to delay the planned gas boiler ban which the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) planned to announce next week.

According to a report in today’s Times, BEIS had been due to publish its heat and building strategy next week “but this is now understood to have been delayed, possibly until the autumn. At a meeting last week Boris Johnson was said to be concerned that it did not do enough to protect consumers and wanted further safeguards….”

Wind energy in crisis as expansion stalls in Germany

Feldheim village near Berlin, Germany.

Subsidies drying up. Public resistance to wind turbines in the neighbourhood. Is the climate steamroller running out of puff in Germany?
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The German wind power industry is suffering setback after setback, says The GWPF.

Hardly any new turbines are being built, and more and more old wind turbines are being phased out. Now wind industry lobbyists are calling for new subsidies and construction rules to be relaxed.

In the Free State of Bavaria there is almost nothing going on when it comes to wind power.

Study ‘projects’ a surge in US coastal flooding starting in 2030s

Credit: nationalreview.com

Anything supposedly ‘rapidly increasing’ or ‘extreme’ in Earth’s climate now or in the near future has to be treated with some suspicion, to say the least. Experience tells us alarmists armed with assumptions don’t need much excuse to go off the deep end to try and stir up the populace.
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In the mid-2030s, every U.S. coast will experience rapidly increasing high-tide floods, when a lunar cycle will amplify rising sea levels caused by climate change, predicts Phys.org.

High-tide floods—also called nuisance floods or sunny day floods—are already a familiar problem in many cities on the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported a total of more than 600 such floods in 2019.

Starting in the mid-2030s, however, the alignment of rising sea levels with a lunar cycle will cause coastal cities all around the U.S. to begin a decade of dramatic increases in flood numbers, according to the first study that takes into account all known oceanic and astronomical causes for floods.

Led by the members of the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team from the University of Hawaii, the new study shows that high tides will exceed known flooding thresholds around the country more often.

A Big Glowing Cloud of Marsdust

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Escaping a planet’s gravity is supposed to be difficult, but some Martian dust does just that.

Spaceweather.com

July 6, 2021: Dust storms on Mars are bigger than we thought; they even spill into space. According to a recent paper in JGR Planets, Mars appears to be leaking dust, filling a huge volume of the inner solar system with gritty debris. You can see it with your naked eye. The bright triangle in this image from the Haleakalā Observatory in Hawaii is marsdust:

“A friend described it as blazing,” says Rob Ratkowski, who took the picture on Feb. 10th. “It was bright and very obvious.”

It’s called Zodiacal Light, and astronomers have long wondered what causes it. The usually faint triangle is sunlight scattered by dust in the plane of our solar system. The dust, it turns out, comes from Mars.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew through the dust cloud en route to Jupiter between 2011 and 2016. Dust grains smashed into Juno at about 10,000 mph…

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UK fiscal watchdog puts cost of reaching net zero at £1.4 trillion

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

Upending both the national economy and personal finances for no noticeable climate benefit is an ‘investment’ in alarmist-speak. How much longer will voters turn a blind eye to these reckless policies?
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The cost of the UK reaching net zero by 2050 could be as high as £1.4 trillion, according to figures released today by Britain’s fiscal watchdog, says CityAM.

The UK economy will require over £1 trillion in investment over the next three decades to hit the government’s target of making Britain carbon neutral, estimates included in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s latest Fiscal Risks report revealed.

Radical Resetters Publish Plan To Wreck America And The Free World

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The climate trojan horse is in plain sight.

PA Pundits International

By Craig Rucker ~

Apparently the problem with the world is that you are too free.

Americans must slash our energy use 87% and abandon limited government and our free economy if we are to live “sustainably” and meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accord.  That is according to a peer-reviewed study by five lead authors published June 29th in the journal Global Environmental Change.

Read the entire study at CFACT.org.

It’s not often that the Socialists planning our future dystopia make their intentions plainly known.

We can thank five academic radicals for doing just that.

Although the study’s authors concede that only countries with high energy use accomplish “decent living standards,” they nonetheless conclude that our political and economic systems are “misaligned with the aspirations of sustainable development” and are “unfit for the challenges of the 21st century.”

You can kiss individual freedom and prosperity goodbye, along…

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Carbon border tax: Europe’s climate fortress endangers Germany’s strength, say press critics

Pointless EU climate ideology is going in the opposite direction to its economic success. Protectionist barriers tend to annoy the victims, with unknown but likely repercussions. Any idea that harmless carbon dioxide is ‘dirty’ is a bad joke, but makes endless work for meddling bureaucrats.
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The EU wants to impose a carbon border tax on Europe’s borders and thus protect domestic producers from dirtier (sic) producers from abroad, says Die Welt (via The GWPF).

Experts warn of a loophole that could hit German exporters seriously.

Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier met two Vice-Presidents of the European Commission when he visited Brussels on Friday: Margrethe Vestager, who is responsible for digital, and Valdis Dombrovskis, who is responsible for economic issues.

The CDU politician wanted to talk to both of them about the steel industry – and about how European steel producers can economically survive the tightening of EU climate targets.

The plans for a CO2 border adjustment tax are also likely to have been an issue. Because the work of the Commission on legislative proposals for such a CO2 surcharge at the borders of the EU are ready to go.

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which in Brussels is affectionately known as CBAM for short, aims to make imported products that are produced less climate-friendly overseas than in Europe more expensive at the borders of the EU.

This climate protection wall around the continent is intended to ensure that European producers with their higher energy costs and stricter environmental regulations remain competitive on their home market.

Full article here.

French Senate blocks referendum on climate change

Since when were French Presidents, or any other leaders, in a position to ‘protect the planet’ or alter the weather? The sooner such obvious nonsense ends, the better.
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Reuters: The French Senate has voted to block a referendum promised by President Emmanuel Macron on whether to enshrine the fight against climate change in the French constitution, it said in a statement on Monday.

Macron had pledged to organise such a vote in response to criticism that he has not done enough to protect the planet.

The Senate, the legislature’s upper house, is dominated by the opposition conservatives.

In May, it watered down draft legislation requiring the constitution to “guarantee” the fight against climate change, preferring less binding wording.

Continued here.

First X-flare of Solar Cycle 25

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Is this solar cycle finally lifting off?

Spaceweather.com

July 3, 2021: Now, Solar Cycle 25 has really begun. On July 3rd, new sunspot AR2838 produced the first X-class solar flare since Sept. 2017. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash:

The July 3rd explosion registered X1.5 on the Richter Scale of Solar Flares

A pulse of X-rays ionized the top of Earth’s atmosphere, causing a shortwave radio blackout over the Atlantic Ocean: blackout map. Mariners, aviators, and amateur radio operators may have noticed unusual propagation effects below 30 MHz just after 1429 UT.

X-flares are the strongest kind of solar flare. They are typically responsible for the deepest radio blackouts and the most intense geomagnetic storms. This is the first X-flare of young Solar Cycle 25. More are in the offing. During the previous solar cycle (Solar Cycle 24) the sun produced 49 of them. Forecasters believe that Solar Cycle 25 should be at least…

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Infinite Power promotes new electricity from radioisotopes technology

Credit: Infinite Power

Are power companies and solar panel producers getting nervous yet? If not, they may see difficulties ahead for this idea.
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Infinite Power’s breakthrough is a semiconductor that can convert high energy beta particles, X-rays, and gamma rays into electricity.

The Infinite Power cells function similarly to a photovoltaic solar cell, with two critical differences: The precise materials and design of the cells allows us to replace solar radiation with high energy releases from natural decay of radioisotopes.

Critically, our proprietary semiconductor can withstand higher energy releases associated with radioisotope decay over a long period of time.