Environment Agency’s alarmist climate report is partly based on an obsolete climate scenario

An obvious problem with the new Environment Agency report reportis its use of climate scenario RCP8.5, which has been widely discredited as unrealistic, impossible and so on. Surely that ought to render any related comments unsuitable as advice to a government. EA report extracts follow.
Air temperature and precipitation: We used RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 to represent climate scenarios that meet or exceed global warming +2°C and +4°C above pre-industrial by 2100.
Sea level rise: For our FCERM schemes we assess a range from the 70th to the 95th percentile of UKCP18 RCP8.5.
River flows: They are relative to a 1981-200 baseline and based on the 50th percentile of UKCP18 RCP8.5, which is consistent with at least a +4°C warming scenario by the end of the century.
Future weather: The projected values for future hot weather and wet weather are taken from UKCP Local (2.2 km) (Met Office, 2019), which complements the UKCP18 projections with data at a higher spatial and temporal resolution than previous climate projections, giving us greater detail on the 52 of 90 frequency and intensity of extreme weather. These projections are only available for a RCP8.5
– – –
The Environment Agency has issued a stark warning on climate change: “Adapt or die”, says ITV News.

In a new report the Government body has preparations need to be made for the inevitable effects of climate change such as more flooding, an increased number of droughts and rising sea levels.

British TV’s COP26 climate change soap opera

Credit: list.co.uk

All aboard the rickety climate bandwagon, destination Glasgow. Soap operas being vehicles for government propaganda – that’s never happened before, surely (cough)? Reality will just be that over-long gap between episodes. Or watch something else.
– – –
For the first time in British television history, the country’s soaps and continuing dramas have joined forces to highlight the issue of climate change and environmental issues, says itv.com.

Casualty, Coronation Street, Doctors, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Holby City and Hollyoaks have each filmed scenes, or have references, to cover different aspects of climate change and, in a soap first, five of the soaps will also be referencing each other as each drama will also give a nod to another.

Drax shares tumble after its ‘renewable energy’ power plant is found to be Britain’s worst CO2 emitter

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

Biomass has been rumbled in the City. Unlucky! But what took them so long to see through the climate hype?
– – –
The City of London feeds off rumours and yesterday Drax was the name on the tip of every trader’s tongue, says the Daily Mail (via Thisismoney).

The energy company saw its shares tumble 5.3 per cent, or 27p, to 483p amid talk in the market that one of the world’s most powerful money managers had blacklisted the stock.

New study confirms Sun/Cosmic-Ray climate connection

Credit: Institute of Physics

This looks like progress, although more research will be needed to try to better understand how the relevant effects work in practice.
– – –
A new study published in Nature Scientific Reports by researchers at the Danish National Space Institute at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem suggests that the Sun’s activity in screening cosmic rays affects clouds and, ultimately, the Earth’s energy budget with concomitant climatic effects, says David Whitehouse @ NetZeroWatch.

This research, by Henrik Svensmark, Jacob Svensmark, Martin Bødker Enghoff, and Nir Shaviv supports 25 years of discoveries that point to a significant role for cosmic rays in climate change.

Energy crisis: The GWPF launches Net Zero Watch

Attempts to turn ‘net zero’ fantasies into reality are going to hit the public even harder than they already do, financially and in practical ways too. And all for what?
– – –
As the energy crisis in Britain and Europe worsens, it is becoming ever more evident that current climate and energy policies are failing, and the public is paying the price, says Dr Benny Peiser of The GWPF (Global Warming Policy Forum).

Net Zero Watch is here to provide serious analysis of naïve and un-costed decarbonisation policies.

Our new campaign and website will shake the tree; scrutinising policies, establishing what they really cost, determining who will be forced to pay, and exploring affordable alternatives.

At Net Zero Watch, readers (and subscribers to our newsletter) will be able to examine the full spectrum of views and critical analysis, enabling our readers to access a credible reality check of official and alternative climate and energy policy research.

Why fast charging reduces the capacity of a car battery

Image credit: BBC

Imagine having a car with a small petrol tank, and it’s slowly shrinking after each fill-up. That’s how EV users must feel, if they know how their batteries behave. A new study analyses the processes.
– – –
When lithium ions are forced rapidly through a battery, they might get stuck and turn into lithium metal, no longer able to move through the battery, says TechXplore.

Imagine being able to refuel your electric car while stopping for a quick snack or refill your phone while brushing your teeth.

“Fast charging is kind of the Holy Grail. It is what everyone who owns a lithium ion battery based device wants to be able to do,” says Senior Engineer David Wragg from Centre for Materials Science and Nanotechnology at the University of Oslo.

Inside the battery, however, there is a lot of complicated chemistry that can be sensitive to how fast it is charged. Things can go wrong.

An energy crisis is gripping the world, with potentially grave consequences – WashPo

Some world leaders just can’t get it into their heads that the wind doesn’t blow on demand, and the sun by definition is daytime only and subject to cloud cover. This has all been said frequently enough, but never seems to hit home in terms of credible energy policies. Ignoring the obvious, they insist that removing reliable power generation is the only way to go, in pursuit of their absurd ‘net zero’ climate targets. An energy crisis in early October doesn’t bode well for the approaching northern hemisphere winter.
– – –
Energy is so hard to come by right now that some provinces in China are rationing electricity, Europeans are paying sky-high prices for liquefied natural gas, power plants in India are on the verge of running out of coal, and the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States stood at $3.25 on Friday — up from $1.72 in April, says the Washington Post (via MSN).

As the global economy recovers and global leaders prepare to gather for a landmark conference on climate change, the sudden energy crunch hitting the world is threatening already stressed supply chains, stirring geopolitical tensions and raising questions about whether the world is ready for the green energy revolution when it’s having trouble powering itself right now.

The economic recovery from the pandemic recession lies behind the crisis, coming after a year of retrenchment in coal, oil and gas extraction.

Climate change tipping points may be too simple a concept, say researchers

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Many of Earth’s complex systems ‘may be more resilient than currently thought’, in the words of the study. Makes a change from claims that various climate nasties lurk just round the corner if this or that is allowed to happen.
– – –
We regularly hear warnings that climate change may lead to ‘tipping points’: irreversible situations where savanna can quickly change into desert, or the warm gulf stream current can simply stop flowing, says Phys.org.

These cautions often refer to spatial patterns as early-warning signals of tipping points. An international team of ecologists and mathematicians has studied these patterns and come to a surprising conclusion.

“Yes, we need to do everything we can to stop climate change,” the authors said in full agreement with the recent IPCC report. “But the Earth is much more resilient than previously thought. The concept of tipping points is too simple.”

The scientists have recently published their work in the journal Science.

The article builds on years of collaboration between a variety of research institutes in the Netherlands and abroad, especially between Utrecht University and Leiden University.

The researchers approached the idea of a tipping point within a spatial context. “The formation of spatial patterns in ecosystems, like the spontaneous formation of complex vegetation patterns, is often explained as an early-warning signal for a critical transition,” explains lead author Max Rietkerk, ecologist affiliated with Utrecht University.

“But these patterns actually appear to allow ecosystems to evade such tipping points.”

These findings are based on mathematical analyses of spatial models and new observations from real-world ecosystems.

Continued here.
– – –
Study: Evasion of tipping in complex systems through spatial pattern formation

E10 Farce As Switch To Greener Fuel ‘major Factor’ Behind Petrol Crisis

Yes, that is the BBC reporter’s name

Sounds credible, despite Government assertions to the contrary. Another example of unintended consequences of interfering in the markets, in the obsessive and fruitless pursuit of so-called climate targets?
– – –
According to the Telegraph, retailers say the Government’s switch to greener fuel played a significant role in September’s petrol crisis (via WorldNewsEra).

The chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association, Brian Madderson, said fuel shortages came as an “unintended consequence” of the Government’s decision to switch to E10 petrol.

“For weeks, we had been emptying our tanks of E5, the old fuel, as fast as we could to get ready for E10,” he said.

“We had all run our petrol stocks down. So, when the panic buying started, many of our members ran out pretty quickly.

Greenpeace loses North Sea Vorlich field legal challenge

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

Shouting ‘climate’ in court doesn’t guarantee legal victories. Appeal to the Supreme Court pending.
– – –
Environmental group Greenpeace has lost its case against the UK government over a North Sea oil field permit, reports BBC News.

Permission to drill the Vorlich site off Aberdeen was given to BP in 2018.

Greenpeace argued in Scotland’s highest civil court there had been “a myriad of failures in the public consultation” and the permit did not consider the climate impacts of burning fossil fuel.

The Court of Session ruling means operations will continue at the field. Greenpeace plans to appeal.

The UK government welcomed the outcome.

Spain’s rare earths pit greens against tech security—and profit

Green blob [credit: storybird.com]

Messing up the local environment for whatever reason is always best done somewhere else. As government-mandated pursuit of renewable [sic] technologies ramps up, ever more industrial dirt-digging aka mining to meet demand is obviously inevitable. 
– – –
Spain’s untapped rare earths are stoking tensions between mining companies and environmentalists and farmers who fear the devastating impact from extracting the minerals considered as essential for a high-tech and low-carbon economy, says Phys.org.

The group of 17 minerals are—despite their name—widely distributed across the globe, but exist in such thin concentrations that extracting even small quantities requires the processing of enormous quantities of ore.

Still, they are key ingredients in a range of high-tech and cutting-edge products, from wind turbines and electric vehicles to smart phones, medical devices and missile-guidance systems.

Heating homes with clean hydrogen will be ‘pretty much impossible’, says UK energy minister

Eco house with hydrogen heating technology. [Image credit: emergingrisks.co.uk]

Another green energy pipe dream bites the dust, before trials have even started? Massive cost compared to other options is just one of the stumbling blocks. Anything more expensive than electricity seems pointless anyway.
– – –
Lord Callanan’s comments come as the British government continues to invest millions of pounds in H2 heating trials, says the Telegraph (via Recharge News).

“If I’m being honest, the idea that we could produce enough hydrogen at reasonable cost to displace mains gas is pretty much impossible,” said Lord Callanan, parliamentary under-secretary of state for climate change & corporate responsibility at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The UK government is currently investing millions of pounds in studies on hydrogen heating, with £25m ($34m) ploughed into the Hy4Heat programme; a pilot scheme in Scotland to heat 300 homes with 100% hydrogen via the existing gas grid due to take place in 2023, backed by up to £18m of grants from the industry regulator Ofgem; and plans to heat a whole town with H2 by 2030.

South Pole froze over in coldest winter on record

Antarctic sea ice [image credit: BBC]

We’re asked to believe this is just a blip in the relentless march of supposedly human-caused global warming, but let’s give it a few more years to see how things progress.
– – –
Antarctica’s frigid winter temperatures are in contrast to trends in the rest of the world, which overall recorded its fourth hottest summer, says LiveScience.

Between April and September, a research station sitting on a high plateau in Antarctica, registered an average temperature of minus 78 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 61 degrees Celsius).

That’s the coldest temperature recorded since record keeping began in 1957, and about 4.5 F (2.5 C) lower than the most recent 30-year average, according to The Washington Post.

Update on the world’s progress eliminating fossil fuels

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

Progress? There isn’t any worth mentioning, and that will continue. Meanwhile ‘net zero’ fantasies are served up daily to obscure the reality and make believe that politicians can be managers of the climate.
– – –
The bureaucrats of the world, particularly in the UN and developed countries, have the idea that they are going to eliminate all use of fossil fuels by somewhere around 2040-50, says Francis Menton at the Manhattan Contrarian (via Climate Change Dispatch).

They have no conception how to accomplish that, other than to order from on high that it shall occur and assume that somebody else will figure out the details.

This gives the rest of us the opportunity to sit on the sidelines and observe how bureaucratic fantasy gradually runs into the brick wall of physical reality.

Carbon dioxide to help cut train delays caused by leaves on tracks

Image credit: Rail Technology Magazine

The BBC headline says ‘dry ice’ [etc.], which is the solid form of carbon dioxide. When deployed ‘The dry ice then quickly turns back into gas’. Surely that won’t do for climate obsessives?
– – –
The new method of removing leaves from tracks will be trialled across northern England in the coming weeks, reports BBC News.

The technique, developed by University of Sheffield engineers, involves blasting tracks with dry ice from a passenger train.

It will be trialled by operator Northern in the coming weeks.

Village homeowners may have gas forcibly cut off if they refuse to take part in hydrogen trial

Eco house with hydrogen heating technology. [Image credit: emergingrisks.co.uk]

At three times the price of natural gas, being cut off from hydrogen sounds like an option worth considering for householders. Electric heat pumps are promoted as an expensive alternative, as so-called climate policies continue to be bulldozed through regardless of affordability.
– – –

Homeowners who refuse to take part in a hydrogen energy trial will be forcibly cut off by gas network operators, under Government plans to test green heating alternatives, says The Telegraph (via VNExplorer).

Residents in one village will begin the pilot scheme by 2025 to help the Government assess whether hydrogen gas can be used as a low-carbon alternative for heating homes across the country.

Ministers insisted the powers to enter people’s homes and switch off their gas would only be used as a “last resort” if the homeowners had refused to engage with any other options.

A consultation, which ended this week, suggests the Government will seek powers to allow gas distribution networks to enter homes if their owners do not wish to take part in the trial, in order to safely switch them off from the gas grid.

Current powers enable network operators to enter premises for a variety of purposes, including for suspected gas leaks or inspecting pipes and fittings.

Hydrogen, which is lighter and more flammable than natural gas, requires homeowners to replace their hobs, ovens, gas fires and pipes to ensure they operate safely.

EV Buyers Beware – Fires, Scarce Charging Times, And Parking Restrictions

.
.
EVs: doing away with the engine, but not the combustion?

PA Pundits International

By Ronald Stein ~

In the wake of a series of severe EV battery fires, one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in the world,General Motors has just issued safety recommendations for Bolt EV’s:

• Not to park your Chevy Bolt within 50 feet of other vehiclesin case it catches fire.
• Highlyrecommends that Bolt EV owners not to park within 50 feet of anything you care about.
• Recommends parking on the top floor or on an open-air deck and park 50 feet or more away from another vehicle.
• RequestsBolt EV owners to not leave their vehicle charging unattended, even if they are using a charging station in a parking deck.

General Motors previouslytold Bolt owners

• to onlycharge the battery to 90 percent,
• charge more frequently,
• and avoid depleting the battery below about 70 miles of remaining range.
• And that they should also park the vehicle outside.

The recent General Motorssafety…

View original post 705 more words

Could Scotland’s unwanted wind turbines be turned into playparks?

Windy Standard wind farm, Scotland [credit: RWE.com]

Ideas, opinions, feedback etc. are invited here. It could be said they’ve already had decades to think about this, but any negativity will no doubt be ignored. Existing uses include children’s play areas and bike sheds, but there’s only so many of those that would find a place.
– – –
One wind farm company is looking for imaginative ways to repurpose turbines at the end of their lives, says BBC News.

When Windy Standard was built in Dumfries and Galloway in the mid-1990s, it was Scotland’s second largest wind farm.

Now it is coming to the end of its functional life and the old turbines are set to be replaced by more powerful machines.

But what happens to the original turbines? Owner Fred Olsen Renewables wants to find creative and sustainable ways to ensure they do not end up in landfill.

Norwegian reservoirs power homes in Great Britain via 724km cable — who wins?

Norwegian hydro-electric site

The suspicion has to be that Britain’s ‘excess’ wind power, if any, would sell for a low price as Norway doesn’t need it, whereas a shortage of power in Britain would allow Norway to sell for a high price, assuming availability at request time. Water can be stored but wind can’t. Some reports are calling this ‘cheap hydro’, but at £1.4 billion just for the cable system such claims appear unconvincing.
– – –
Norwegian reservoirs will begin powering homes in Great Britain today as the world’s longest subsea power cable was switched on, in a boost to renewables and tight energy supplies this winter, says New Scientist.

The 724-kilometre North Sea Link is the sixth of a growing network of electricity interconnectors between Great Britain and its European neighbours, to trade energy and adapt to grids increasingly reliant on the variable output of wind, solar and hydro.

First tested in June, the copper cable along the seabed of the North Sea will operate at half its potential for three months before reaching its 1400 megawatt capacity, enough to power 1.4 million homes.

Power is expected to initially mostly flow from Norway, which generates almost all its electricity from hydro, to Great Britain, where electricity prices are higher.