Climate: Battle lines harden over how to slash CO2 (never ask what for)

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Another year, another season of so-called climate negotiations. The planet is more than capable of warming, or cooling, on its own without human activities. But the current obsession with minor trace gases, and their supposedly disproportionate effects on the global climate, has infected too many minds to consider such realities at the political level. As a result all manner of pointless ‘remedies’ have to be mulled over.
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Banish fossil fuels, capture their emissions, pull CO2 from thin air—diplomats in Bonn for UN-led climate talks agree there’s too much planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but remain at loggerheads on the best way to reduce it, says Phys.org.

At stake is nothing less than a liveable world: even if humanity caps global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius—a huge ‘if’—hundreds of millions will still confront devastating heat, drought, flooding and sea level rise, recent studies have shown. [Talkshop comment – often meaning the output of unreliable climate models using unlikely scenarios as input].

There are three ways to deal with the problem, intervening at different points in the CO2 “value chain” from source to tailpipe: stop burning fossil fuels, by far the main driver of warming; if you do burn them, stop carbon pollution from seeping into the air; and remove CO2 from the atmosphere once it’s there. [Talkshop comment – ‘carbon pollution’ is a false term].

Green Omertà – Net Zero Watch

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

Conspiracy, mass delusion or a bit of both? Whatever it is, it’s not doing electricity consumers any favours.
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There is a conspiracy of silence about wind power costs, says Andrew Montford @ Net Zero Watch.

I know, I do tend to be a bit repetitive about the cost of wind power.

How many times have I explained that the data is completely clear: that it’s expensive; and that if it’s getting any cheaper, it’s only doing so very slowly. In fact, for onshore wind the trend is clearly upwards.

My determination on the subject is prompted by the refusal of anyone in official circles to accept the facts.

To a man (and woman) they are absolutely resolute in their insistence that wind is staggeringly cheap because windfarms have agreed staggeringly low-priced “strike prices” for power. And because industry bodies and Whitehall says it is.

The fact that nobody has ever delivered power at such a price cuts no mustard with these people.

Nor does the observation that windfarm developers are all saying that new construction will not go ahead without further handouts.

And of course, if you point to the hard data in windfarm financial accounts, they really, really do not want to know at all.

Continued here.

Geomagnetic Storms Pump Terawatts into the Thermosphere

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Solar activity remained high throughout May.

Spaceweather.com

June 2, 2023: If you’re a satellite, this story is important.

A series of geomagnetic storms in 2023 has pumped terawatts of energy into Earth’s upper atmosphere, helping to push its temperature and height to a 20-year high. Air surrounding our planet is touching satellites in low Earth orbit and dragging them down.

“Blame the sun,” says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley. “Increasing solar activity is heating the top of the atmosphere. The extra heat has no effect on weather or climate at Earth’s surface, but it’s a big deal for satellites in low Earth orbit.”

Above: A severe geomagnetic storm on March 24, 2023, injected more than a terawatt of infrared energy into the thermosphere. Image credit: Michael Underwood in Yellowstone National Park

Mlynczak is an expert on the temperature up there. For 20 years he has been using the SABER instrument on NASA’s TIMED satellite to monitor infrared…

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Solar panels – an eco-disaster waiting to happen?

Image credit: solaruk.net

The same question can be asked of wind turbines and old lithium-based batteries. Experts warn of a waste mountain by 2050.
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While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 years, says BBC News.

Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed of and replaced.

“The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels,” says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

According to the British government, there are tens of millions of solar panels in the UK. But the specialist infrastructure to scrap and recycle them is lacking.

Surplus electricity farce: UK ‘power dumping’ into nearby countries that don’t want it

Electricity transmission [credit: green lantern electric]

The UK National Grid is now for technical reasons unable to adequately control its own electricity generation, due to excessive amounts of solar power output under favourable weather conditions. This cost the country nearly £10 million last Monday alone and is ‘likely to occur on any sunny weekends this summer’.
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Energy data firm EnAppSys has raised concerns about National Grid ESO‘s actions, stating that power is “being dumped into Belgium and the Netherlands”, reports Energy Live News.

According to EnAppSys, these countries currently have an excess of power, prompting National Grid ESO to pay high prices to offload the surplus.

Energy Live News contacted National Grid ESO for comment, but they declined to provide a statement.

Phil Hewitt, Director of EnAppSys, shed light on the situation, explaining that National Grid ESO cited it as an “energy action” taken to manage an oversupply of power and reduce generation and interconnector imports.

Mr Hewitt told Energy Live News: “The reason National Grid ESO gave yesterday (Monday 29th May) was that it was an energy action. This means they had too much power and needed to reduce generation and interconnector imports.

“They couldn’t turn off power stations because they needed them on to provide inertia to the system so this left the interconnectors as their only option. To change the output of interconnectors, they trade with counterparties that have access to the intraday markets on the other side of the interconnector. These traders quote prices that National Grid ESO then accepts to change the output of the interconnectors.

“This kind of high price reversal event is likely to occur on any sunny weekends this summer. As a response to the high energy prices last year, industrial and domestic consumers in Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and France have responded by installing solar panels; this has resulted in a big increase in solar generation on sunny days.

“Electricity system operators in these countries need to investigate how to create curtailment products to encourage consumers to stop generation during these periods, otherwise the SOs will be spending a lot of money on balancing the markets on these kind of days.

“Yesterday (Monday 29th May), National Grid ESO spent £9.4 million on balancing the system by trading and using the balancing mechanism.”

Full report here.