Europe asking Russia for more coal is set for disappointment

German coal: back to the future
[image credit: BBC]

What to do when you need reliable electricity generation *now*? Pay up, look big and burn fuel – if you can get it, and have something to burn it in. Renewables-obsessed governments are struggling to justify their blinkered ‘net zero’ policies now the energy chips are really down. All this with the COP26 climate talks looming.
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It’s not just extra natural gas that Europe’s struggling energy markets are finding tough to get from Russia, says Bloomberg (via MiningWeekly.com).

Power producers in the continent are being forced to ask Russia for more coal to ease an energy crunch with winter approaching and record-high gas prices denting profitability, according to officials at two Russian coal companies.

But they may be left stranded as any increase in exports from the country won’t be substantial, they said.

Study says Earth is dimming due to ‘climate change’ – but may be natural?

Halfway through this article we see the study’s findings were made ‘where increases in sea surface temperatures have been recorded because of the reversal of a climatic condition called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with likely connections to global climate change’. So the PDO has changed, which it regularly will do as its name (‘decadal’) indicates, and they want to tie the consequences to humans? That seems to be implied, although left vague by the usual catch-all term ‘climate change’.
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WASHINGTON—Warming ocean waters have caused a drop in the brightness of the Earth, according to a new study, says Eurekalert.

Researchers used decades of measurements of earthshine — the light reflected from Earth that illuminates the surface of the Moon to find that there has been a significant drop in Earth’s reflectance over the past two decades.

The Earth is now reflecting about half a watt less light per square meter than it was 20 years ago, with most of the drop occurring in the last three years of earthshine data, according to the new study in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

That’s the equivalent of 0.5% decrease in the Earth’s reflectance. Earth reflects about 30% of the sunlight that shines on it.

SSE’s renewable energy output drops almost a third – due to wrong type of weather

Windy enough today?

Weather conditions can vary year on year, but ‘some of the poorest wind conditions in the North Sea for more than two decades’ probably wasn’t on anyone’s list of scenarios. As a result the not-so wondrous wind turbines are under-performing, and with less electricity to sell comes less profit so shareholders won’t be impressed either. What will next year bring? Place bets now!
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SSE’s renewable energy output over spring and summer was almost a third lower than planned, as low winds and dry weather combined with high gas prices to push up energy prices, reports the Financial Times (via Swiftheadline).

The FTSE 100 energy supplier said on Wednesday its wind and hydro output between April 1 and September 22 was 32 per cent beneath its target — equivalent to an 11 per cent hit to its full-year production forecast.

The summer was “one of the least windy across most of the UK and Ireland and one of the driest in SSE’s hydro catchment areas in the last 70 years”, the company said in a statement.

SSE’s update is the latest sign of how unfavourable weather conditions are hitting the renewables sector.

It comes as a global gas shortage, a rebound in energy demand after coronavirus lockdown restrictions and some of the poorest wind conditions in the North Sea for more than two decades have propelled UK and continental European energy prices this month to their highest ever levels.

Full report here.

Mini nukes to get boost from Government funding

Small modular reactor [credit: ANS Nuclear Cafe]

Plan or knee-jerk reaction to current events? At least it sounds better than the usual vacuous cries of ‘build more renewables’ as a viable route to future electricity supplies.
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The Government is considering ploughing more cash into mini nuclear reactors in an attempt to prevent further energy crises as Britain transitions to net-zero carbon emissions, reports the Telegraph (via VNExplorer).

Rolls-Royce could be in line for extra support for its small modular reactors as the current energy price crunch heightens the political focus on bolstering the security of the nation’s long-term electricity supply.

Age of Hysteria

Frank Davis

Oh dear,

Changing what we eat is a radical act that will make us and nature healthier and happier. By making nature-conscious eating choices and helping to spread the word, each of us can contribute to keeping planetary warming within the 1.5° Celsius limit laid out in the Paris agreement. A healthier plate makes for a safer planet.

We’re living in an age of hysteria.

There’s no way of “keeping planetary warming within the 1.5° Celsius limit laid out in the Paris agreement.” That “limit” is a nonsense. We’ve always been helpless passengers aboard a planet on a roller-coaster ride around the Sun. We’re in control of next to nothing. We have no control whatsoever of the orbit of planet Earth, nor of the Sun’s radiation, nor of the solar system’s planets and asteroids and comets. Nor are we even in control of the gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, including the tiny fraction…

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Climate Change Committee misled Parliament about the cost of Net Zero

Obfuscation and greenwash in the name of climate policy exposed once again.
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Claims of low cost were based on “grossly misleading” assumptions, says The Global Warming Policy Forum.

* Highly optimistic assumptions about EV costs have been called into question by the actual development of EV costs since the CCC advised Parliament
* Committee on Climate Change spreadsheets only revealed after 2 year freedom of information campaign
* Costs could be £60,000 per household higher than the CCC estimates that MPs used when they were considering Net Zero legislation

London, 26 September – The Sunday Telegraph reports today that Parliament was misled into supporting Net Zero plans to decarbonise the economy.

The Climate Change Committee (CCC) told MPs that British households and businesses would face only a modest cost for reaching Net Zero emissions in 2050, but analysis of their financial models by the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) shows that key assumptions were not credible even at the time the report was published.

EU countries struggle to agree approach to COP26 climate talks

EU countries can’t agree their best rate of economic decline due to expensive and damaging so-called climate policies that won’t have any measurable effect of the type they seek. Have they considered the possibility that there is no such rate?
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European Union countries are struggling to agree their negotiating position for the COP26 climate change conference, with rifts emerging over timeframes for emissions-cutting pledges, according to officials and documents seen by Reuters, says Euractiv.

The EU is drafting its position ahead of the November COP26 talks, where countries will attempt to finish the technical rules to put the Paris Agreement into effect.

One issue they will try to settle is whether countries’ climate targets under the 2015 accord should follow a “common timeframe”.

Gone With The Wind: America’s Energy Future On Display In Europe

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Prepare for more unrest if/when energy prices accelerate even more due to unworkable so-called climate policies, and what used to be reliable supply becomes problematic.

PA Pundits International

By Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. ~

As if the continuing spread of the COVID-19 Delta variant and fears of being flooded by waves of Afghan refugees weren’t enough, Europe is facing another crisis: The wind isn’t blowing.

Steady, reliable northwesterly winds blowing in from the North Atlantic and the North Sea were supposed to be a key component of Europe’s low-carbon future. Private investment capital and lavish taxpayer subsidies poured into the wind energy industry. By the thousands, gigantic wind turbines – offshore and onshore – mushroomed into the skies. Western Europe’s picturesque coasts and charming countryside have been defaced by these monstrosities, but everyone was assured it’s for a good cause. Nothing less than the planet’s future is at stake. And besides, wind power, along with solar power, will produce reliable affordable electricity.

Or maybe not.

For weeks, the wind from the North Atlantic and the North Sea has been…

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Britain runs coal power stations amid energy crisis

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

UK energy policy, based on hypothetical climate theories, is unravelling just as PM Boris Johnson is claiming at the UN that going green is easy. Alternatives to coal are proving to be a lot more problemmatical than expected. Running short of affordable power is an avoidable outcome of supposed climate strategy, and makes governments look incompetent.
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Britain, which faces soaring natural gas prices, has been forced to run coal-fired power stations in order to secure energy supplies, electricity generation company Drax said on Thursday.

The country is particularly exposed to Europe’s ongoing energy crisis due to its reliance on natural gas to generate electricity, says TechXplore.

The price of European gas futures has more than doubled since May.

Eliminating Crude Oil Is Like Jumping Out Of A Plane Without A Chute

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Having an energy ‘safety net’ may sound like a plausible idea but suggestions tend to run up against the laws of physics and other practical roadblocks, such as cost and sheer inadequacy.

PA Pundits International

By Ronald Stein ~

The world, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are proposing banishment of fossil fuels and are focused on reducing emissions from fossil fuels at any costs, but a safety net of having a viable replacement should be in place before we jump off that cliff.

Banning oil imports, fracking, and ceasing oil production to focus on the symbolic renewable energy as the fossil fuels replacement is fooling ourselves as that “clean energy” is only electricity generated from breezes and sunshine.

Before the healthy and wealthy countries abandon all crude oil fracking and exploration that will eliminate the supply chain to refineries and put an end to that manufacturing sector, we should have a safety net to live without the crude oil fuels and derivatives that are manufactured from that energy source. Without any clones to access everything we get from crude oil; the termination…

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No alarm here? NASA finds 2021 Arctic summer sea ice 12th-lowest on satellite record

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio

With only 43 years of official satellite data, 12th-lowest is somewhat yawn-inducing from an alarmist point of view, but interesting in that it’s 38% greater than the lowest level (since 1978) reached in 2012. But that stat probably won’t feature in any media headlines, as it might sow seeds of doubt about the supposed correlation of a slowly rising CO2 level with increasing seasonal sea ice loss, which very clearly failed to show this year.
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Sea ice in the Arctic appears to have hit its annual minimum extent on Sept. 16, after waning in the 2021 Northern Hemisphere spring and summer, says SpaceRef.

The summertime extent is the 12th-lowest in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.

This year, the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 4.72 million square kilometers (1.82 million square miles).

Power mad: This devastating audit lays bare the costly errors

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Matt Ridley blasts the UK’s destructive so-called climate policies, and the clueless eco-fantasist outlaws, running rampant at the moment.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

But the root of the crisis lies in the monomaniacal way in which this government and its recent predecessors have pursued decarbonisation at the expense of other priorities including reliability and affordability of energy.

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BBC: Climate reporting reaches melting point

Antarctica

More meltdown than melting. The author reckons ‘Tackling global warming will be the central project of the 21st Century’, but the NSIDC graphic below doesn’t suggest anything alarming. No doubt the BBC will be offsetting all those supposedly wicked ‘carbon emissions’ from flying a reporter round the world. Sadly the trip only extended to West Antarctica, parts of which are close to a significant volcanic region, whereas the majority of the ice is in East Antarctica. See: Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet. In 2015 a NASA study reported ice gains exceeding losses in Antarctica as a whole, with the net losses being in the west and the net gains in the east.
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A trip to a melting glacier will shape how the BBC’s new climate editor reports on climate change, says the BBC.

You cannot help but be awed by the scale of Antarctica, the great white continent.

I visited just before the pandemic struck and it is impossible not to feel humbled in the presence of something that seems so much bigger and more powerful than you.

Earth Can Makes Its Own Auroras

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Professor says it’s “a giant feedback loop in space.”

Spaceweather.com

Sept. 20, 2021: No solar storms? No problem. Earth has learned to make its own auroras. New results from NASA’s THEMIS-ARTEMIS spacecraft show that a type of Northern Lights called “diffuse auroras” comes from our own planet–no solar storms required.

Diffuse auroras look a bit like pea soup. They spread across the sky in a dim green haze, sometimes rippling as if stirred by a spoon. They’re not as flamboyant as auroras caused by solar storms. Nevertheless, they are important because they represent a whopping 75% of the energy input into Earth’s upper atmosphere at night. Researchers have been struggling to understand them for decades.

Above: Diffuse auroras and the Big Dipper, photographed by Emmanuel V. Masongsong in Fairbanks, AK

“We believe we have found the energy source for these auroras,” says UCLA space physicist Xu Zhang, lead author of papers reporting the results in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space…

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Finally a real crisis: shortage of carbon dioxide

The UK shut down cheap coal, refused to drill for its own gas, and failed to replace its old nuclear power stations then, when gas suddenly becomes expensive, is caught with its proverbial trousers down. So much for ‘world leading’ climate policies.
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As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves, say The Times & The GWPF.

Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions – poorer, colder, hungrier – unless Government changes course.

Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain’s commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down.

Emergency talks were being held between government officials and food producers, retailers and the energy industry with warnings of a “black swan event”, an extremely rare blow with unpredictable consequences.

The closure of two fertiliser plants in northern England and others in Europe has left the food and drink industry facing a shortage of carbon dioxide, which is a byproduct of fertiliser manufacturing. The gas is critical to the production and transport of a range of products, from meat to bread, beer and fizzy drinks.

The meat industry estimates that businesses can carry on for less than two weeks before carbon dioxide stocks run out….

Full article here.

Iceland’s volcanic eruption the longest in half a century

A local expert comments: “There seems to be still enough magma from whatever reservoir the eruption is tapping. So it could go on for a long time.”
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It will be six months on Sunday that the volcanic eruption currently mesmerising spectators near Reykjavik first began, making it the longest Iceland has witnessed in more than 50 years, says Phys.org.

The first lava began spewing out of a fissure close to Mount Fagradalsfjall on the evening of March 19 on the Reykjanes peninsula to the southwest of Reykjavik.

And the ensuing spectacle—ranging from just a slow trickle of lava at times to more dramatic geyser-like spurts of rocks and stones at others—has become a major tourist attraction, drawing 300,000 visitors so far, according to the Iceland Tourist Board.

Iceland’s sixth volcanic eruption in 20 years is already longer than the preceding one in Holuhraun, in the centre-east of the island, which lasted from the end of August 2014 until the end of February 2015.

Climate Narcissism

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Climate is not subject to debate – because they have nothing to say except repeating dogma and empty slogans.

PA Pundits International

By Peter Murphy~

Are humans causing extraordinarily bad weather events in the United States?

The question should seem ludicrous on its face, yet many serious, educated and accomplished people in the U.S. and globally claim we are, starting with the President of the United States, Joseph Biden. Add about half of the U.S. Congress, much of the corporate America, and the media and entertainment industries, which purportedly believe such drivel.

Making and believing evidence-free claims about human behavior contributing to catastrophic weather may be explained at least in part by the narcissistic tendencies of so many politicians and others with grandiose feelings of power and importance.

That human actions, namely, our economic behavior in an industrialized world, are causing the planet to warm in a tangible way and resulting in bad weather is belied by science and history.  Something deeper is occurring.

President Biden constantly asserts human-induced global warming…

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Solar power: Busting the problem of cloud cover?

Image credit: MIT

Of course ‘busting the problem’ of zero nighttime output isn’t going to happen. Vague references to ‘other sources’ of power attempt to gloss over such glaring issues.
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The downside to solar power is that it’s not always sunny and so grid operators have to compensate for energy drops by bringing alternative generation sources online, says TechXplore. [Talkshop comment – every time clouds appear?].

New research in the International Journal of Powertrains, looks at how short-term forecast of sunshine using satellite images could offer one tool to help power companies maintain a steady supply.

A. Shobana Devi of the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, in Chennai, India and colleagues explain how solar irradiance forecasting currently represents a major challenge to companies hoping to integrate solar energy resources into the existing structures of energy supply.

Fire cuts British power imports adding to supply squeeze, soaring prices

[credit: green lantern electric]

The ‘incident’ as they call it is likely to put the affected power link to France out of action for about four weeks [update: up to 6 months]. Is paying in excess of £450 per megawatt-hour of electricity sustainable? This is what can happen when fuel-burning power stations are closed and not replaced, as per political climate obsessions.
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A fire halted a power link between France and Britain on Wednesday, squeezing tight UK electricity supply further and sending prices to near record highs, reports Reuters.

Day-ahead British power prices jumped almost 19% on the news, nearing record highs hit this week exacerbated by low wind supply and soaring gas prices. read more

National Grid said the fire prompted the evacuation of its IFA1 interconnector site in Sellindge in Kent.

New CO2 monitoring credit card enables tracking of ‘carbon footprint on every purchase’ – ‘Monitors & cuts off spending when we hit our carbon max’ – Mastercard & UN join forces

CO2 is not pollution

Another reason to reduce or avoid credit card usage.
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Get ready for a Chinese-style social credit system scoring when it comes to your personal spending habits and how they impact “climate change”, says Marc Morano at Climate Depot.

A new credit card called Doconomy, has launched that is “working in tight collaboration with Mastercard” and an alliance with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is now available so you can monitor your personal CO2 budget on every purchase you make.

The new CO2 monitoring Mastercard called Doconomy debuted in order to enable “all users to track, measure and understand their impact by presenting their carbon footprint on every purchase.”

The credit cards feature the slogan on them reading “DO. Everyday Climate Action” and have a personal pledge on the rear of the card boasting: “I am taking responsibility for every transaction I make to help protect the planet.”

The Mastercards feature the UN “Global Climate Action” logo on them as well.

Continued here.