Council’s Climate Change Director ‘to be paid more than the Energy Minister’

Money down the drain?
[image credit: thisismoney.co.uk]

Attempting to save the world, or this bit of it anyway,
from ‘climate change’ is a lucrative game.
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A North East London council is actively searching to find a new director to lead its climate change work offering a salary that is reportedly larger than that of Energy Minister Greg Hands.

The role of Director of Climate Emergency and Behavioural Change at Waltham Forest Council will be paid £109,000 a year, reports Energy Live News.

That is £5,000 more than the Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Hands, according to the Daily Mail.

Fracking companies threaten government with legal action over ban

[Not to scale]

The complaint now, or one of them, is that geothermal is free to do things the hydraulic fracturers weren’t allowed to do prior to their ban, and which in part led to the ban.
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Fracking companies have threatened to take legal action over the government’s ban on the practice, amid the sector’s growing frustration at being left behind the UK energy revolution, according to reports – City AM.

The sector sent “pre-action correspondence” to the government after fears prompted by earthquakes in 2019 led to a ban on drilling, according to the Telegraph, which first reported the news.

Among the fracking projects that had to be abandoned after the ban, was one financed by billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe whose company Ineos wrote off £63m in 2019.

Climate cycles create California precipitation uncertainty

Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Point, San Francisco

Inserting unnecessary theories into climate models, in order to invent ways of blaming human activities for the weather, seems to be making life more difficult for the modellers in terms of accuracy of results. Natural variation is getting in the way.
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Over the past 40 years, winters in California have become drier, says Phys.org.

This is a problem for the region’s agricultural operations, as farmers rely on winter precipitation to irrigate their crops.

Determining if California will continue getting drier, or if the trend will reverse, has implications for its millions of residents.

But so far, climate models that account for changes in greenhouse gases and other human activities have had trouble reproducing California’s observed drying trends.

Florida Gov. DeSantis brilliantly proposes plan to fight rising seas without any ‘left-wing stuff’

Miami, Florida [image credit: phys.org]

A practical approach to weather-related local problems, without any overblown climate alarm propaganda.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a series of steps to defend Florida against rising sea levels Tuesday, even as he denounced the use of the term “global warming” as a “pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things”, says Climate Depot.

The governor submitted 76 projects to the state Legislature to improve drainage, raise sea walls and take other steps to fight flooding across the state.

The state would spend about $270 million, with local matches typically required.

“We’re a low-lying state, we’re a storm-prone state, and we’re a flood-prone state,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Oldsmar, just outside Tampa.

Panel: Consider tinkering with oceans to suck up more carbon – but first, give us a $1 billion+ to research it

Cumulus clouds over the Atlantic Ocean [image credit: Tiago Fioreze @ Wikipedia]

That’s their opening offer anyway, according to Phys.org. Another attempt to cash in on the ‘something must be done’ propaganda of climate alarmism that demonises the essential trace gas carbon dioxide. Usual unproven ‘heat trapping’ claims presented as fact here.
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The United States should research how to tinker with the oceans—even zapping them with electricity—to get them to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air to fight climate change, the National Academy of Sciences recommends.

The panel outlines six ways that could help oceans remove more heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The scientists said the most promising possibilities include making the seas less acidic with minerals or jolts of electricity, adding phosphorous or nitrogen to spur plankton growth and creating massive seaweed farms.

For many Europeans, the electric vehicle revolution is a mirage

Teslas in Norway [image credit: Norsk Elbilforening (Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association)]

Usual problems: high cost, range anxiety, lack of charging points, battery life, maybe resale value. Not much incentive for less well-off private buyers, even with subsidies. Corporate fleets seeking tax breaks more to the fore.
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The view from Brussels policymakers is clear: the electric vehicle revolution is firmly underway. But a EURACTIV investigation reveals serious barriers to electric vehicle acceptance across eastern and southern Europe.
. . .
Listen to EU policymakers and you will come away convinced that the electric vehicle revolution is firmly underway, says EURACTIV.

“I think the move towards electric vehicles is moving much faster than anybody would have anticipated,” EU climate chief Frans Timmermans said earlier this year, expressing a widely held view in Brussels.

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen similarly assured Europeans that “change is already happening” in her 2021 state of the union address, pointing to Germany’s registration of more electric vehicles than diesel cars in the first half of 2021.

Not only are sales of electric vehicles surging, but Tesla, perhaps the world’s best known electric vehicle manufacturer, is now the most valuable car company on Earth.

The shift to e-mobility, it seems, is happening at pace, inexorably changing the driving landscape.

But a EURACTIV investigation into electric vehicle uptake across the continent challenges this narrative, revealing serious barriers to EV acceptance across eastern and southern Europe.

A poorly developed second-hand market for electric vehicles, confusion over subscriptions for charging services, and concerns over the degradation of batteries continue to hamper electric vehicle adoption, compounding frequently mentioned issues such as high upfront costs and a lack of charging infrastructure.

What emerges from EURACTIV’s reporting is a picture of an electric vehicle revolution that is bypassing less well-off Europeans.

Continued here.

Too dry, too hot, or too wet: Increasing weather persistence in European summer , say researchers

Omega blocking highs can remain in place for several days or even weeks [image credit: UK Met Office]

No prizes for guessing how this story ends: it’s your fault, or so the researchers want us to believe. Human-caused emissions of trace gases are supposed to have made weather systems more prone to being stationary for longer, reports Phys.org. But where’s the mechanism that points to humans, we may ask. Blocked weather itself is a long-known and well understood phenomenon.
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“In our study, we show that persistent weather conditions have an increasing similarity in summer over the North Atlantic, Europe and Siberia, favoring more pronounced extreme weather events. In Europe alone, about 70% of the land area is already affected by more persistent weather situations,” says Peter Hoffmann from the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead author of the study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports.

“This means that people, especially in densely populated Europe, will likely experience more and also stronger and more dangerous weather events.”

UK energy Balancing Mechanism costs ‘skyrocketed by 294%’ – to nearly £1 billion for the quarter year

Of course if the UK was willing to tap its own coal and onshore gas and had enough places to burn them, which could have been the case but isn’t, much of this eye-watering expense wouldn’t be needed. But foolish climate obsessions like costly so-called renewables and ‘net zero’ have dulled the minds of too many politicians so here we are. Expect more of the same.
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From September to November, the BM cost reached £967m, compared to £337m the same period last year, reports Energy Live News.

The crisis in the energy market has so far had many collateral damages – one of them, the cost of the Balancing Mechanism (BM) that soared by 234% during the three-month period, from September to November.

Quest begins to drill Antarctica’s oldest ice – again

Ice core sample [image credit: Discovering Antarctica]

Previous studies indicated temperature change preceded CO2 change, but the BBC says they occurred ‘in parallel’ or ‘in lockstep’, obscuring the key role of insolation while waffling about supposedly ‘heat trapping’ gases.
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Efforts are about to get under way to drill a core of ice in Antarctica that contains a record of Earth’s climate stretching back 1.5 million years, says BBC News.

A European team will set up its equipment at one of the highest locations on the White Continent, for an operation likely to take four years.

The project aims to recover a near-3km-long cylinder of frozen material.

Scientists hope this ice can help them explain why Earth’s ice ages flipped in frequency in the deep past.

Trees are biggest methane ‘vents’ in wetland areas – even when they’re dry

Amazon Rainforest, near Manaus [image credit: Neil Palmer/CIAT @ Wikipedia]

For climate obsessives and modellers convinced of the claimed effects of ‘important greenhouse gases’ (to quote the reporter), this must be a bit of a setback.
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Most of the methane gas emitted from Amazon wetlands regions is vented into the atmosphere via tree root systems—with significant emissions occurring even when the ground is not flooded, say researchers at the University of Birmingham.

In a study published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the researchers have found evidence that far more methane is emitted by trees growing on floodplains in the Amazon basin than by soil or surface water and this occurs in both wet and dry conditions, reports Phys.org.

The Climate Change Committee has vastly overplayed its hand — The Telegraph

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

The cost of trying to make an unmeasureably small difference to the climate by demonising the essential trace gas carbon dioxide is unknown, but vast. Nevertheless most of the UK’s elected politicians regularly vote for almost anything suggested as necessary to help towards the ludicrous ‘net zero’ emissions target.
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Statist recommendations from the Climate Change Committee are treated like holy grail by Parliament, says The Telegraph.

The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) this week published a report on the outcome of COP26, predictably calling for government to “walk the talk” and implement policies that will deliver net zero by 2050.

True to form, the CCC is acting like an eco-activist NGO rather than offering balanced and independent advice. And, as usual, its recommendations are being treated as beyond questioning.

To grasp the scale of influence this independent advisory body now holds, look no further than Parliament’s decision in 2019 to wave through the net zero target without even a Commons vote.

Zero Global Warming This Century

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The next few years with expected lower than ‘normal’ solar cycle activity should be illuminating, one way or another.

Science Matters

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean.  But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling has now completely overcome the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April and now again in November, 2021 (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Moana Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~55 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby.  These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming…

View original post 1,076 more words

A rush to mine the deep ocean has environmentalists worried

Seabed mining

Trying to replace high-energy coal, gas, and oil with lower energy alternatives to pacify climate obsessives has various drawbacks. One of these is an endless need for huge amounts of minerals, metals etc. that have to be mined from somewhere, which can of course be messy to say the least.
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In a large building overlooking the sea in Kingston, Jamaica, national members of a little known international organisation are meeting for contentious talks that could open up the planet’s deep seabed to mining as soon as July 2023, says Climate Home News.

The ocean floor is rich in mineral deposits, which could provide raw materials to manufacture batteries for electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines.

Prospective mining companies see a lucrative opportunity to turbocharge the energy transition.

UK Should Prepare For More Extreme Weather, Government Warns After Storm Arwen

Image credit: Electricity North West

Bad weather? Blame the ‘climate crisis’ – it’s government policy to do so! Climate fixing is a slow process…roll on 2050, or later…who are they kidding, apart from themselves?
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Britain can expect greater disruption from storms in the future and should prepare for more extreme weather following the chaos wrought by Storm Arwen which brought snow and high winds to much of the country earlier this week, ministers have warned.

Thousands of homes remain without electricity after winds that hit speeds of almost 100mph ripped across parts of northern England and Scotland, tearing down power lines, uprooting trees and causing snow drifts and debris blockages on roads, says The Independent (via QNewsCrunch).

Research aircraft reveal a surprisingly strong Southern Ocean carbon sink

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]

Having much better information about how nature’s carbon cycle is working, before attempting to apply random expensive schemes of uncertain impact to try and alter it, would surely be a sound approach, as the researchers suggest. Surprises might not be welcome ones.
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The Southern Ocean is a significant carbon sink says Phys.org, absorbing a large amount of the excess carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by human activities, according to a new study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The findings provide clarity about the role the icy waters surrounding Antarctica play in buffering the impact of increasing greenhouse gas emissions, after research published in recent years suggested the Southern Ocean might be less of a sink than previously thought.

Recent European droughts are not unprecedented, new study finds – Net Zero Watch

Drought in Europe

Climate attribution i.e. supposed detection of human-caused factors, is in the eye of the beholder. This article concludes: ‘At the recent GWPF annual lecture Professor Steven Koonin of New York University said climate attribution studies were the scientific equivalent of being told you had won the lottery, after you had won the lottery.’
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A new study concludes that when placed into a long-term context recent drought events in Europe are within the range of natural variability and are not unprecedented over the last millennium, says Net Zero Watch.

The 2003 European heatwave and drought has a special place in the history of the study of our changing climate.

It was the first event that scientists attributed to human-induced climate change.

A paper by Stott et al published in Nature concluded, “Human influence has at least doubled the risk of a regional heatwave like the European Summer of 2003.”

This was later strengthened and the event was said to be directly caused by humans.

Arctic rainfall predicted to increase faster than expected, say modellers

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

More than a whiff of climate alarmism here. Modelling of the future is billed as research, and so-called climate policies are advocated.
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The amount of rainfall in the Arctic may increase at a faster rate than previously thought, according to a modelling study published in Nature Communications.

The research suggests that total rainfall will supersede snowfall in the Arctic decades earlier than previously thought, and could have various climatic, ecosystem and socio-economic impacts, says Nature Asia.

The Arctic is known to be warming faster than most other parts of the world, leading to substantial environmental changes in this region.