Bacton, Norfolk ‘has undeveloped gas reserves of up to 2 trillion cubic feet’

Of course climate-obsessed policymakers want to use it produce hydrogen and capture any CO2, at unknown but hefty expense — doing things the hard way. Why not save a fortune and just put it into the existing gas network?
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Low carbon hydrogen could heat up to 20 million homes and businesses across London and the South East of England for decades to come, according to a new industry report.

The Bacton Energy Hub (BEH), a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) hydrogen project, located on the coast of Norfolk, could not only help to secure the UK’s energy supply but also play a major role in significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, says the North Sea Transition Authority.

Currently the National Transmission System (NTS), supplying gas to homes and businesses in London and the South East of England, consists largely of methane. However, it is possible that by 2030 hydrogen produced at Bacton could be blended into the NTS, helping the transition to net zero while ensuring energy security.

A New Paradigm for Solar Activity: The Extended Solar Cycle

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“It poses significant challenges to prevalent dynamo theories of the solar cycle.” — Indeed, but such theories were always speculative anyway.
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Spaceweather.com

Dec. 12, 2022: So you thought you knew the solar cycle? Think again. A new paper published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences confirms that there is more to solar activity than the well-known 11-year sunspot cycle. Data from Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) reveal two solar cycles happening at the same time, and neither is 11 years long.

“We call it ‘the Extended Solar Cycle,'” says lead author Scott McIntosh of NCAR. “There are two overlapping patterns of activity on the sun, each lasting about 17 years.”

Solar physicists have long suspected this might be true. References to “overlapping solar cycles” can be found in research literature as far back as 1903. A figure from the new Frontiers paper seems to clinch the case:

The top panel shows sunspot counts since 1976. The curve goes up and down every 11 years, which explains why everyone thinks the…

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Fieldwork starts on Thwaites Glacier – British Antarctic Survey

Thwaites glacier has its own complexities, including proximity to dozens of underwater volcanoes. Wikipedia says it’s ‘nicknamed the Doomsday Glacier’ and ‘The Thwaites Ice Shelf, a floating ice shelf which braces and restrains the eastern portion of Thwaites Glacier, is likely to collapse within a decade from 2021’. Statements like ‘computer models show’, ‘how soon a transition to more rapid ice retreat might occur’ and ‘collapse of the glacier’ (the size of Florida) arouse a certain amount of scepticism. More than a whiff of climate alarm enthusiasm here.
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Nearly 60 scientists and support staff are on their way to Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, says the British Antarctic Survey.

It’s part of an ambitious international effort to understand the glacier and surrounding ocean system to determine its future contributions to global sea-level rise.

This season represents the fourth of five planned field seasons.

‘Breakthrough’ claimed as fusion experiment generates excess energy for the first time

Before getting too excited, note that the energy used was ‘enough to boil six kettles of water’, at vast expense and effort. Still some way to go to ‘save the planet‘, to borrow a time-worn phrase from climate melodrama.
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FUSION FIRST – Scientists have hailed a ‘true breakthrough’ as a fusion reaction has successfully generated more energy than was used to create it, says Imperial College London.

For over seventy years, scientists have been attempting to harness thermonuclear fusion – the power source of stars – to generate energy.

Fusion has the potential to produce vast quantities of clean energy using few resources, requiring only a small amount of fuel and generating limited carbon emissions.

Once a fusion plasma is ‘ignited,’ it will continue to burn for as long as it is held in place.

Global ‘Stilling’: Is Climate Change Slowing Down the Wind?

Windy enough today?

This recent Yale Environment360 article came into focus today when Sky News headlined with: Future of renewable energy in balance as UK suffers wind drought – with ‘global stilling’ to come. Ironically, climate theory has it that warming will happen and will reduce wind speeds over the decades ahead. According to one expert (says Yale), a 10 percent decline in wind speeds would actually result in “a 30 percent drop [in output], and that would be catastrophic.”
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Last year, from summer into fall, much of Europe experienced what’s known as a “wind drought,” says Yale.

Wind speeds in many places slowed about 15 percent below the annual average, and in other places, the drop was even more pronounced.

It was one of the least windy periods in the United Kingdom in the past 60 years, and the effects on power generation were dramatic.

Wind farms produced 18 percent of the U.K.’s power in September of 2020, but in September of 2021, that percentage plummeted to only 2 percent. To make up the energy gap, the U.K. was forced to restart two mothballed coal plants.

UK fires up old coal plants to prevent power cuts

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

Staying warm, or even alive, takes priority over tedious climate dogma. Energy policy related to electricity generation is exposed as pitifully inadequate when the wind dies down and the days are short. The demise of cold spells in winter has been greatly exaggerated.
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Emergency plans to fire up old coal plants have been triggered by National Grid as cold weather sparked fears of a supply shortage, says Energy Live News.

Two coal-fired generation units at Drax power station in Yorkshire have been instructed to be warmed up and ready for potential usage today.

Climate activists “waging war on the mind” – Net Zero Watch

Credit: nationalreview.com

Author Stephen McMurray says that professional psychologists are using fear as a weapon to manipulate public behaviour.
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McMurray says:

Psychologists are saying, quite openly, that telling people facts doesn’t work, and that psychological pressure should be brought to bear in other ways. Their professional bodies seem to have no interest in preventing this shameful and completely unethical behaviour.”

McMurray says that the Government and Civil Service are also quite open about using psychological warfare against the population at large.

Indeed, the view in Whitehall appears to be that fearmongering, as widely applied during the Covid pandemic, was a success, and should be seen as a model for use in the drive for Net Zero.

Civil servants seem quite happy to treat the public as lab rats for them to experiment on as they see fit. They are out of control, and nobody in Government seems to have any interest in stopping them.”

Source here.
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NZW press release: The Climate Change Cult and the War on the Mind [pdf]

Wall Street’s Biggest Names Are Backing Off Their Climate Commitments

Crazy world of climate finance [image credit: renewableenergyfocus.com]

Finance giants don’t like hefty fines for exaggerating their supposed climate virtues, or law suits for not acting in the best interests of their clients. Solution: leave their net-zero climate club.
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Vanguard, the world’s second-largest asset manager, announced that it is resigning from a global net-zero initiative.
. . .
Shortly before COP26, last year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, financial institutions were rushing to announce their climate commitments, says Grist (via Gizmodo).

The conference’s leadership and Mark Carney, a special envoy appointed by the United Nations to push private finance to invest in climate solutions, announced the creation of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero, or GFANZ.

Belfast councillors to undergo ‘carbon literacy training’

CO2 is not pollution

Sounds like a bizarre make-work scheme dreamt up by climate obsessives. Will they hear about photosynthesis?
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Belfast councillors are to undergo “carbon literacy training” to ensure they understand the science behind climate change, says the Belfast Telegraph.

It comes as the council is working to reduce its carbon footprint, recently announcing it will transition its vehicles that are currently powered by diesel to hydrotreated vegetable oil.

Earlier this year, the council adopted a target of reducing the city’s carbon emissions by 66% from its level in 2000 by 2025.

A Climate and Resilience Committee has also been established to help the council achieve its ambitions.

£1.3bn Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon officially sunk as developer loses planning appeal

Credit: TLP

Unreliable, ‘poor value for money’ electricity project bites the dust. For now, anyway.
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Plans for the £1.3bn Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon have been dealt a blow by the Court of Appeal, which has ruled that work on the project did not commence within five years of receiving planning approval and therefore the development consent order (DCO) is no longer valid, says New Civil Engineer.

The project, put together by developer Tidal Lagoon (Swansea Bay), was to build the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant. This would span Swansea Bay to form a lagoon between the River Tawe and the River Neath.

The structure would have had 16 turbines producing a up to 320MW per day.

Fresh understanding of ice age frequency – Otago study

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

By saying, of Antarctica’s ice sheets, “this research shows they actually advanced and retreated much more often – every 41,000 years – until at least 400,000 years ago”, the research adds a new twist to the longstanding 100,000 year problem of ice ages. It puts obliquity firmly back in the frame.
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A chance find of an unstudied Antarctic sediment core has led University of Otago researchers to flip our understanding of how often ice ages occurred in Antarctica, says Eurekalert.

Lead author Dr Christian Ohneiser, of the Department of Geology, says it turns out they were much more frequent than previously assumed.

“Until this research, it was common knowledge that over the last million years global ice volume, which includes Antarctica’s ice sheets, expanded and retreated every 100,000 years.

“However, this research shows they actually advanced and retreated much more often – every 41,000 years – until at least 400,000 years ago,” he says.

Italy’s Transport Minister Asks EU To Stop ICE Vehicle Ban

Political climate obsession has gone way too far with EV ‘mandates’, as the Italian minister implies. Today’s EVs are too expensive and impractical to be a suitable future for private transport.
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Italy’s Transport Minister Matteo Salvini has asked the EU Commission’s Transport Commissioner and his French and German counterparts to review the ban on ICE vehicle sales that is set to go into effect in 2035, reports OilPrice.com.

Salvini told Italian news outlet Ultimore that the proposed ban on the sale of fossil fuel-burning vehicles “makes no economic, environmental or social sense.”

Salvini’s stance on the ICE vehicle sales ban echoes that of carmakers and the European car industry association, ACEA, in the summer of 2021.

Longest early December cold spell in last 22 years in Moscow

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

We note that’s the period of two solar cycles. Meanwhile it’s reported to be milder than average around the Arctic: December serving up baked Alaska and warming most of Arctic. Much is made of lower sea ice than a few decades ago. But could the two events be related, as a blocking high pressure system has hovered over Scandinavia and western Russia in the last two weeks?
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The cold spell that began on November 30 continues in Moscow, reports Gismeteo.

Yesterday was the sixth day of the cold anomaly. The average daily temperature has been 4°C to 7°C below normal.

It is mostly sunny and dry, with the mercury dropping to -10…-14°C at night (down to -18…-20°C in the Moscow region) and rising to -5…-8°C in the afternoon.

How often does this happen at the beginning of the calendar winter?

France to pay up to €500m for falling short of renewable energy targets

St. Nazaire wind farm

Move over, carbon credits. Here come ‘statistical megawatts’.

H/T Tallbloke
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France is the only one of the 27 EU member states to have missed its objective for 2020, when renewable energy represented 19.1% of its consumption, below the 23% target, says Le Monde.

For failing to reach its European targets for renewable energy in 2020, which it had set itself a decade earlier, the French state will have to pay out several hundred million euros.

“It will cost France €500 million this year for not having met its target for renewable energy,” the Minister for Energy Transition told MPs on Monday, November 21, as reported by the French daily newspaper Libération.

MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen rejects ‘climate change’ as ‘a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative’

Dr. Lindzen – a long-time critic of IPCC-sponsored climate theories – argues, among other things, that ‘Changes in mean temperature are primarily due to changes in the tropic-to-pole difference, and not to changes in the greenhouse effect.’ Unfortunately decades at the forefront of climate research don’t count with some people unless you’re making the right alarmist noises.

H/T Climate Depot
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Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new paper: An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative. – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation – September 22, 2022:

Climate change is “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system.” –

“The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂.”

“Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.”

Source here.

Prince William’s Earthshot prize won’t save the planet

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

The Prince promotes a goal of ‘a stable climate’, which has never existed before except in someone’s imagination. Net zero fantasy rumbles on.
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I hate to pour cold water on the Prince of Wales’ big night out in Boston on Friday, where he hosted the Earthshot Prize for climate change solutions, says Ross Clark @ The Spectator.

William needs all the help he can get to distract attention from his brother and sister-in-law as they continue their crazed attack on the royal family.
. . .
If we are going to have a prize which genuinely helps get us close to net zero emissions by 2050, an affordable means of carbon capture is certainly one thing you would hope would be among the five winners.

Clouds less climate-sensitive than assumed

Cumulus clouds from above [image credit: Jakec @ Wikipedia]

From airborne observations, these researchers find ‘trade-wind clouds are far less sensitive to global warming than has long been assumed’. Their study says: ‘Our observational analyses render models with large positive feedbacks implausible’. Consequently, they believe, extreme rise in Earth’s temperatures is less likely than previously thought.
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In a major field campaign in 2020, Dr. Raphaela Vogel who is now at Universität Hamburg’s Center for Earth System Research and Sustainability (CEN) and an international team from the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg analyzed observational data they and others collected in fields of cumulus clouds near the Atlantic island of Barbados.

Their analysis revealed that these clouds’ contribution to climate warming has to be reassessed, says Eurekalert.

“Trade-wind clouds influence the climate system around the globe, but the data demonstrate behavior differently than previously assumed. Consequently, an extreme rise in Earth’s temperatures is less likely than previously thought,” says Vogel, an atmospheric scientist.