The wind and solar power myth has finally been exposed

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

All the arguments here have been expressed elsewhere – usually by climate sceptics – many times, but now the national press is more willing to let the cat out of the bag. The basic problem for renewables is energy storage, or lack of it and as the Telegraph article says, ‘The necessary miracle doesn’t exist’.
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Many governments in the Western world have committed to “net zero” emissions of carbon in the near future, says The Telegraph.

The US and UK both say they will deliver by 2050. It’s widely believed that wind and solar power can achieve this.

This belief has led the US and British governments, among others, to promote and heavily subsidise wind and solar.

These plans have a single, fatal flaw: they are reliant on the pipe-dream that there is some affordable way to store surplus electricity at scale.

The next Green front? Your front lawn

Never mind the advancing weeds. The war on anything fuel-powered in the name of climate obsessions continues unabated.
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First, they came for your gas-powered car, says Larry Behrens @ CFACT. Then they came for the gas-powered stove.

Up next on the chopping block of the environmental left is the gas-powered lawn mower and the start of “No Mow May.”

If you haven’t heard of this phenomenon it means forgoing mowing your lawn for a month, so it takes on a more natural presence all in the name of helping bees.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those little honey generators as much as the next guy but in this case, they are being used as a proxy in the green fight. Here’s the real buzz.

Sheer weight of electric vehicles could sink our bridges

One estimate reckons 1 in every 20 UK bridges is ‘substandard’. Road surfaces and tyre wear must also be affected. More unintended consequences of climate obsessions and so-called green policies.
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Councils should check the weight limits on bridges to ensure they don’t collapse with heavier electric cars travelling across them, ministers have suggested.

The news comes after concerns were raised that multi-storey car parks might collapse if too many electric vehicles (EVs), which can weigh as much as 33 per cent more than traditional petrol cars, are parked on them, says The Telegraph.

Tory MP Greg Knight asked in the Commons whether Transport Secretary Mark Harper or other Cabinet colleagues might assess the “adequacy of the strength of multi-storey car parks and bridges at safely bearing the additional weight of electric vehicles”.

El Niño on the way?

The SIS Group surveys the recently active commentary/prediction scene, finishing with climate alarm central aka the UN. Elsewhere, NOAA’s ENSO blog explains Why making El Niño forecasts in the spring is especially anxiety-inducing. Warmists are willing one to get going soon.
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The story begins at https://www.netzerowatch.com/rapid-ocean-temperature-rise-puzzles-scientists/  … rapid ocean temperature changes are on the way as the planet moves from a persistant La Niña position into El Niño conditions.

This will please the alarmists as global ocean temperatures appear to be a forewarning of El Niño – the only few times in the last 25 years that there has been an upward spike in global temperatures.

Mostly, it has flatlined.

Continued here.

It’s worse than we thought: there are only five years left

Old monkeyface emailed me to say: No, not five years of planetary existence! We have only five years left before the climate emergency unravels entirely.

How do I get to that prediction? We all know how hard predictions are, especially about the future. Well, I base it all on the fundamental observation that the planet has cycles and whether we understand them or not those cycles are going to carry on cycling, and we really should just get used to it.

Now radiative physics is pretty straightforward, but the whole climate emergency is based on a substantial amplification of the modest (and probably beneficial) warming that the recent increase in carbon dioxide concentrations has allegedly contributed to. And the climate klaxons are blaring full blast because people seem to believe that the earth (which has been around a while) is teetering on the edge of countless precipices. Should we cross this threshold, or that limit, they tell us, we will plunge over the edge into a hothouse world.

Personally, I’m a tad more concerned that we slip into another ice age, mini or major; that would be much more damaging to the human race and more difficult to adapt to than a warmer world. But let’s examine one of those precipices in a bit more detail.

1875 was coldest in 10,000 years, Warming A Good Thing

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‘We made ourselves an extremely poor experiment when we started to observe meteorology at the coldest time in the last ten thousand years.’ – Indeed.

Science Matters

Jørgen Peder Steffensen, of Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute, is one of the most experienced experts in ice core analysis, in both Greenland and Antarctica. In this video he explains a coincidence that has misled those alarmed about the warming recovery since the Little Ice Age.  And if you skip to 2:25, you will see the huge error we have made and the assumptions and extrapolations based on that error.  Transcript below is from closed captions with my bolds and added images. H/T Raymond

What do ice cores tell us about the history of climate change and the present trend? 

This ice is from the Viking age around the year one thousand, also called the medieval warm period. We believe that in Greenland the Medieval Warm Period was about one and a half degrees warmer on average than today

NorthGRIP the Greenland ice core project is being reopened to drill…

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Heating supplier: Why are we only talking about heat pumps?

Expensive heating [image credit: the Guardian]

Because the government can claim, rightly or not, that they’re cheaper to run than gas boilers? Like electric cars, heat pumps are best suited (if at all) for financial and other reasons to certain categories of property dweller, and the rest…not so much.
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An electric heating supplier has criticised the UK’s obsession with heat pumps when it comes to meeting net zero targets, says PropertyWire.

The government offers a £5,000 grant towards installing heat pumps, and so far just shy of 10,000 have been handed out since the scheme launched last year.

Keith Bastian, chief executive of electric heating company Fischer Future Heat, said installing 600,000 a year by 2028 is ‘optimistic at best’.

King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down

Image credit: BBC News

Climate alarmism with an end date is asking for trouble, to say the least. Gems such as this from 2008 — Prince Charles: Eighteen months to stop climate change disaster — spring to mind.
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This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history, says Rupert Darwall.

No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly.

Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.

How seaweed has been misleading scientists about reef health

Coral reefs can have their ups and downs, due to various factors. Not for the first or last time, scientists have made the occupational hazard of erroneous assumptions.
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For decades, scientists have looked to seaweed as an indicator of the health of coral reefs lying underneath, says Phys.org.

But what if the seaweed was misleading them?

New UBC research reveals it was, and scientists need new ways to determine whether human activity is harming a particular reef.

The Practical Impossibility Of Large-Scale Carbon Capture And Storage

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Further to the recent Talkshop article, confirmation that carbon capture is little more than a silly game using lots of energy and incurring vast costs for minimal or even net-negative of its hoped-for results.

PA Pundits International

By Steve Goreham~

The Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would set stringent limits on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from US power plants. Utilities would be required to retrofit existing plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or to switch to hydrogen fuel. Others call for the use of CCS to decarbonize heavy industry. But the cost of capture and the amount of CO₂ that proponents say needs to be captured crush any ideas about feasibility.

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from an industrial plant before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and storing it for centuries to millennia. Capture may be accomplished by filtering it from combustion exhaust streams. Pipelines are proposed to transport the captured CO₂. Underground reservoirs could be used for storage. For the last two decades, advocates have proposed…

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Carbon capture: a net emitter of CO2 ?

CO2 is not pollution

A BBC article headline asked: ‘Carbon capture: What is it and how does it fight climate change?’ But a report last year found a Shell Oil project output more CO2 than it captured. The amount of CO2 such sites can capture is negligible anyway, and they’re relying on ‘hopium’ to bring the high costs down. Given the lack of evidence of success of CCS installations, why is the BBC – or anyone – promoting it as a climate benefit?
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The UK government has announced that the first sites in the UK to capture greenhouse gases will be in Teesside, says BBC News.

The carbon capture plants are designed to prevent carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial processes and power stations being released into the atmosphere.

The announcement was part of the government’s new Net Zero Strategy and aims to move the UK closer to meeting its legally-binding carbon commitments.
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Why is carbon capture needed?

Carbon capture power plants are part of the government’s commitment to remove carbon from UK electricity production by 2035.

Revealed: Trees planted to help achieve net zero are adding to Scotland’s carbon emissions

Sitka spruce forestry in Scotland

Another avoidable green fiasco in the name of climate obsession.
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Millions of pounds are being spent carpeting thousands of acres of land with conifers on the basis they will lock up CO2 from the atmosphere.

But a new report shows that many of the forests springing up around the country likely add to the risk of climate change, says the Sunday Post.

Vast tracts of peaty soil are being dug up and drained in order to plant trees, unleashing a torrent of stored carbon [dioxide] into the environment.

West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated far inland, re-advanced since last Ice Age

Antarctica

This research suggests natural climate variation in Antarctica has a much wider range than expected.
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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting rapidly, claims EurekAlert, raising concerns it could cross a tipping point of irreversible retreat in the next few decades if global temperatures rise 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

New research finds that 6,000 years ago, the grounded edge of the ice sheet may have been as far as 250 kilometers (160 miles) inland from its current location, suggesting the ice retreated deep into the continent after the end of the last ice age and re-advanced before modern retreat began.

“In the last few thousand years before we started watching, ice in some parts of Antarctica retreated and re-advanced over a much larger area than we previously appreciated,” said Ryan Venturelli, a paleoglaciologist at Colorado School of Mines and lead author of the new study. “The ongoing retreat of Thwaites Glacier is much faster than we’ve ever seen before, but in the geologic record, we see the ice can recover.”

The big melt: Crushed houses, trapped cars and the threat of floods – inside California’s buried ski resort

Claims that climate scientists ‘have never seen anything like it’ don’t tell us much as human lifetimes are short compared to Earth’s climate variations. There’s the story of the drained lake that reappeared – so clearly it was once there before any talk of ‘climate change’.
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High in the California mountains, a ski resort sits buried under layers of snow and ice, says Sky News.

Residents of Mammoth Lakes fear for their lives, and livelihoods, after a winter of record snowfalls.

Wooden houses are blanketed under white powder, cars are buried beneath cement-like drifts, and roads are lined by colossal snow banks stretching up to 50ft tall.

Every so often a dagger-like slab of snow or ice will slide from a rooftop and shatter on the ground.

Is Charles too political to make a good constitutional monarch?

“I have dedicated much of my life to the restoration of harmony between humanity, nature and the environment, and to the encouragement of corporate social and environmental responsibility. Quite frankly, it has been a bit of an uphill struggle. But, now, it is time to take it to the next level.

“In order to secure our future and to prosper, we need to evolve our economic model. Having been engaged in these issues since I suppose 1968, when I made my first speech on the environment, and having talked to countless experts across the globe over those decades, I have come to realise that it is not a lack of capital that is holding us back, but rather the way in which we deploy it. Therefore, to move forward, we need nothing short of a paradigm shift, one that inspires action at revolutionary levels and pace. With this in mind, I am delighted to be launching a Sustainable Markets Initiative, with the generous support of the World Economic Forum.”

This man is about to take an oath promising to govern us according to our laws and customs. But he actually wants to do away with such customs as being able to choose what sort of transport to buy, and being able to use the Kings highway without impediment. Because of his long held ideological stances and alignments, he is not respected by a large proportion of the people in the disunited kingdom. Tough times for pro-monarchists.