No sign of decrease in global CO2 emissions, say researchers – is anyone surprised?

US coal train [credit: Wikipedia]

The pretentious-sounding ‘Global Carbon Project science team’ (80 names) confirms the fairly obvious: the world is using at least as much fuel power as ever. A recent stat from Goldman Sachs’ Jeff Currie: ‘$3.8 Trillion of Investment in Renewables Moved Fossil Fuels from 82% to 81% of Overall Energy Consumption’ in 10 Years. More misery for climate obsessives. No sign of fear of climate retribution to be seen in the data.
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Global carbon [dioxide] emissions in 2022 remain at record levels — with no sign of the decrease that is urgently needed to limit warming to 1.5°C, according to the Global Carbon Project science team.

If current emissions levels persist, there is now a 50% chance that global warming of 1.5°C will be exceeded in nine years, claims Science Daily.

The new report projects total global CO2 emissions of 40.6 billion tonnes (GtCO2) in 2022.

Story of Ötzi the Iceman gets multi-glaciation rewrite from researchers

Ötztaler Alps, Austria [image credit: Kogo @ Wikipedia]

In this new version, the idea that the famous body was only found due to recent warming after being under ice continuously for over 5000 years gets buried, so to speak. The sting in the tail is this: ‘the researchers also found evidence suggesting that Ötzi had not died where he was found in the gully — instead, he had been transported down the mountain by natural environmental processes’. If, as they say, he ‘had melted out of the ice many times’, those times must have occurred at various higher levels, suggesting greater warming then than we (so far) see today. This poses an awkward question or two for prevalent climate theories.
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A small team of researchers affiliated with institutions in Norway, Sweden and Austria, has found evidence that suggests a flaw in the original story of how Ötzi (the Iceman) remained preserved for so long, says Phys.org.

In their paper published in the journal The Holocene, the group details what they describe as a more plausible explanation.

In 1991, a couple of German hikers came upon the remains of a man frozen in the ice in the Ötztal Alps. Testing of the remains showed the man to be from approximately 5,300 years ago.

Getting sillier by the day: ‘Global South needs $2 trillion a year to tame, cope with climate’

It’s called ‘an investment blueprint for greening the global economy’, but means digging up ever more of the planet to find metals, minerals etc. with machinery mostly powered by the dreaded (by climate obsessives) fossil fuels. The imagined benefit is impossible to quantify – just pay up. Every year.
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Developing and emerging countries—excluding China—need investments well beyond $2 trillion annually by 2030 if the world is to stop the global warming juggernaut and cope with its impacts, according to a UN-backed report released Tuesday. Phys.org reporting.

A trillion dollars should come from rich countries, investors and multilateral development banks, said the analysis commissioned by Britain and Egypt, hosts respectively of the 2021 UN climate summit in Glasgow and this week’s COP27 event in Sharm el-Sheikh.

The rest of the money—about $1.4 trillion—must originate domestically from private and public sources, said the report.

Climategate, the Movie: Boffins Turning Tricks

The Talkshop doesn’t do film reviews as a rule, but we have to make an exception for this amusing one from Tony Thomas. A tale of dodgy e-mails, thwarted FOI requests, feeble inquiries, and assorted sinister goings-on. We’ll even offer a short excerpt to give readers a taste of it.
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TT: The top copper rates the case as “Category A”, literally worse than a homicide investigation because it could imperil the planet, you see. “So we can expect some additional support from national counter-terrorism, Scotland Yard,” he intones. A brown lady constable (two BBC diversity boxes ticked) interjects, “Sorry, boss, but who’s been murdered?” He snaps at her, “Look at the timing! Join the dots! Three weeks before COP15 [Copenhagen]. If this is someone trying to influence the global response to climate change, then I’d say Category A is not enough!” The now chastened lady constable nods: now she gets it.
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Tony Thomas writes: If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t change a thing, except I’d skip The Trick, a movie about the Climategate scandal that makes heroes of the villains. The BBC aired it last year, and it’s finally accessible on Britbox via my Apple TV. It’s a thriller and the hero is Dr Phil Jones, who, in 2009 when the scandal broke, was a “world renowned” top scientist on a mission to save the planet from the perils of CO2…

Continued here.

The ‘geothermal moonshot’

Geothermal is just as likely to run into legal challenges as other forms of underground energy recovery. The article below is part of ‘a special feature on the hazards and potential of geothermal energy’, featuring the habitat of Nevada’s tiny and endangered Dixie Valley toad.
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From his home office in Carson City, Nevada, Paul Schwering monitors an old gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota, approximately 1,000 miles away and a mile underground.

What was once the Homestake Gold Mine has been repurposed as a research station for enhanced geothermal systems, also known as engineered geothermal systems, a technology that could increase the United States’ geothermal power generating capacity 40-fold, says the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Energy experts estimate that geothermal energy could contribute up to 10 percent of US electricity generation, but only if researchers can figure out how to make enhanced geothermal systems work on a large scale.

Enhanced geothermal systems have been called the “geothermal moonshot.”

UK to be ‘clean energy superpower’?

CO2 is not pollution

Without sufficient dispatchable electricity generation the UK could become a low-energy power on windless nights. Alarmist talk of ‘worst droughts in 500/1000 years’ begs the question: what caused those historical events? Demonising a vital atmospheric trace gas makes no sense.
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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is to call on global leaders to speed up the transition to renewable energy when he addresses the UN COP27 climate summit today, says Energy Live News.

He travelled to Egypt yesterday after a U-turn on his earlier decision to not attend the event, attracting much criticism from environmental activists and political opponents.

Mr Sunak will also tell politicians and business leaders that Britain will work with international allies and be at the “forefront of this global movement” towards clean energy.

Climate Clowns

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Tim Cullen reviews some of the evidence – or lack of it – for the so-called climate emergency/crisis hype, as COP27 kicks off.

MalagaBay

Roll up! Roll Up! The Climate Circus is coming to town.

Read: Climate Clowns

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Scientists discovered a river longer than Thames beneath the Antarctic ice sheet

Antarctica’s George VI Ice Shelf [image credit: CIRES Colorado Univ.]

Interesting, but too many uncertainties at this time to reach any firm conclusions. The river system is ‘beneath kilometers of thick ice’.
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Scientists at Imperial College London, the University of Waterloo, Canada, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, and Newcastle University have discovered an unexpected river under the Antarctic ice sheet, says Tech Explorist.

The discovery of this 460km-long river shows the ice sheet’s base has more active water flow than previously thought, which could make it more susceptible to changes in climate.

The river is believed to affect the flow and melting of ice, contributing to the acceleration of ice loss during climate warming.

Sea-level rise in the Mediterranean Sea branded ‘staggering’, due to scientists ‘using a vital new method’

Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia

Vastly higher? Enormous? Staggering? – should we be shocked? No, because none of these words from the article below appear in the study itself, which notes: ‘We find that, between 1960 and 1989, sea level in the Mediterranean fell’. It then ‘started accelerating rapidly’. The study also admits: ‘The relative contributions from sterodynamic changes (i.e., changes in ocean density and circulation) and land-ice melting to this recent increase in the rate of Mediterranean sea-level rise remain unclear.’ Looks like the press release resorted to colourful language.
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Scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have discovered a substantial rise in sea-levels in the Mediterranean Sea, using a vital new method to measure changes in sea-level, says the NOC.

The study, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, demonstrated that sea levels in the Mediterranean Sea have risen at vastly higher rates over the past 20 years compared to the entirety of the 20th century.

The study revealed that sea level in the Mediterranean Sea increased by about 7cm in the period 2000–2018.

Previous changes in sea-level rise in the Mediterranean Sea have been highly unpredictable due to limited observational data but using this latest method, scientists analysed sea-level data from tide gauges and satellites to reveal an enormous increase as a result of ocean warming and land ice-melt.

Why International Climate Summits Are Doomed To Fail, Part 1: Aspirations Untethered From Reality

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The UN’s pointless obsession with a minor trace gas continues to lead politicians up the garden path, taking their countries with them.

PA Pundits International

By Katie Tubb ~

First of two articles

Representatives from some 190 countries will meet in Egypt for two weeks starting Nov. 6 to “[deliver] for people and the planet” at COP27, the U.N. Conference of the Parties annual summit on climate change policy.

President Joe Biden arrives for the COP26 U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, on Nov. 1, 2021. More than 120 world leaders met in what they apocalyptically called a “last, best hope” to tackle the climate crisis and avert a looming global disaster. COP27 opens Sunday in Egypt. (Photo: Adrian Dennis/ AFP/Getty Images)

The predominant message at these climate conferences is one of “catastrophic” global warming necessitating policies to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions drastically.

COP27 in Egypt will likely be no different, even though last year’s conference in Glasgow, Scotland, was heralded by the United Nations and the popular press as “one minute…

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Another Kilimanjaro glacier prediction, following earlier failures

Here’s a recent report, posting a video from 2014 saying the glaciers could be gone by 2020. The report itself, headlined ‘Mount Kilimanjaro’s Glaciers Estimated to be Gone by 2030’, says: ‘In 2006, National Geographic News published some stunning satellite images of Africa, courtesy of United Nations Environment Program. One of the images shows the glacial retreat occurring on Mount Kilimanjaro between 1976 and 2006. Earlier predictions of the glaciers disappearing by 2020 were obviously incorrect.’ (Al Gore was in the 2020 camp).
The next line is interesting: ‘Glacial retreat is attributed to lower precipitation, and not global warming.’ No research is quoted to support that statement, but this journal article says: ‘During the last 120 years, annual precipitation on Mount Kilimanjaro (Tanzania) has decreased by 600–1200 mm (Hemp, 2005a)’. UNESCO pushes the usual CO2 climate theory and hazards another prediction, much more cautious now, as COP27 is about to start.
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Glaciers at many UNESCO World Heritage sites including Yellowstone and Kilimanjaro National Park will likely vanish by 2050, the UN agency warned Thursday, urging leaders to act fast to save the rest, reports Phys.org.

The warning followed a study of 18,600 glaciers at 50 World Heritage sites—covering around 66,000 square kilometres (25,000 square miles)—which found glaciers at a third of the sites were “condemned to disappear”.

The study “shows these glaciers have been retreating at an accelerated rate since 2000 due to CO2 emissions, which are warming temperatures”, UNESCO said.

Temperatures in Europe rise at twice the global average, claims the UN

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

All that so-called climate protection money with net zero result? Cue demands for ever greater obsession with trace gases in the atmosphere at COP27 and beyond.
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The continent has seen temperatures rise at a rate more than double that of the rest of the world over the past thirty years, reports DW.com.

At the same time, European countries had significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
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“Temperatures over Europe have warmed significantly over the 1991-2021 period, at an average rate of about +0.5 °C per decade,” the WMO [World Meteorological Organization] said in a statement.
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In the EU, greenhouse gas emissions had decreased 31% between 1990 and 2020.

Full report here.

How 1970s conservation laws turned Australia into a tinderbox

Bush fire

Hardly a surprising conclusion in this research. A classic example of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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Southeast Australia’s bushfire crisis culminated in the devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020 that burnt nearly 25 million hectares of bush, says Phys.org.

Our new research demonstrates how the scale of this disaster blew out due to legislation introduced in the 1970s, which was based on idea that nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention.

We investigated the bushfire history of one of the worst hit areas: Buchan on Gunaikurnai Country in Victoria.

We found no bushfires burned there for almost a century until the mid 1970s, following the establishment of the Land Conservation Act of 1970—legislation that sought to protect the Australian bush from humans.

This legislation banned farmers from mimicking Aboriginal burning practices by using frequent fires to promote grass for livestock. As a result, the amount of flammable trees and shrubs exploded in the region.

It was only after this prohibition on burning that catastrophic bushfires became an issue in the Buchan area.

The prolonged neglect of southeast Australian forests under the guise of conservation means our forests now carry dangerous levels of fuels. This creates the conditions in which climate-driven bushfires become megafires, devastating Country and people’s lives.

Full article here.
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Related — in California ‘roughly 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent…were released by the state’s 2020 wildfires…[The] draft 2022 Scoping Plan…urges state and federal authorities to drastically increase the thinning and treatment of forests that have become dangerously overgrown with flammable vegetation.’

UK Trapped In A Green-Energy Cul-De-Sac

Try to cover up the chronic energy policy mistakes made in the name of climate theories by doling out vast sums of borrowed money to the struggling customers. That’s the current UK approach. Why should anyone be content with putting the exchequer ever further in the mire to keep futile net zero dogma alive?
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Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California, and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall,” says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy.

A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your way.

In the cul-de-sac, you are trapped with no evident way of getting out.