Sunak unveils expansion of North Sea oil and gas drilling, opponents prefer imports

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]

Opponents say the UK should be cutting fossil fuel production but ignore the reality of continuing demand, meaning imports would have to increase. All they do is whine about the climate and call for ever more part-time wind power, which isn’t a direct replacement anyway. The carbon capture announcement is a bit of a joke when heavily subsidised but supposedly ‘green’ Drax wood burners are the UK’s biggest emitters of CO2.
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Summary – from BBC News.

The government will issue hundreds of new oil and gas licences for the North Sea, Rishi Sunak confirms

The first will be issued this autumn – with at least 100 in the next round

“We’re choosing to power up Britain from Britain,” says Sunak

And he says even when the UK reaches net zero in 2050, it will still need oil and gas

Earlier and earlier high-Arctic spring replaced by ‘extreme year-to-year variation’, say researchers

Still waiting

This observation doesn’t correlate with monotonic CO2 rise data. Apparently we’re left looking at ‘tremendous natural climate variability’, which doesn’t sound much like the claims and expectations of prevalent IPCC-type theories. The researchers say ‘temperature increases have stalled’, and ‘the previously observed trend has disappeared completely’. Little wonder then that some Arctic alarmists have been less shrill in recent years — their trend melted away.
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About 15 years ago, researchers reported that the timing of spring in high-Arctic Greenland had advanced at some of the fastest rates of change ever seen anywhere in the world.

But, according to new evidence, that earlier pattern has since been completely erased.

Instead of coming earlier and earlier, it seems the timing of Arctic spring is now driven by tremendous climate variability with drastic differences from one year to the next.

“As scientists we are obliged to revisit previous work to see whether the knowledge obtained at that time still holds,” says Niels Martin Schmidt of Aarhus University in Denmark.

How carbon colossus China dwarfs Britain’s net zero push

The imaginary ‘fight against climate change’ takes a new twist, as a few inconvenient facts get an airing from an unlikely source, showing just how ludicrous UK political obsessions have become. Example: ‘Sir Tony was correct to note that in some years the rise in China’s annual emissions has indeed been greater than Britain’s total CO2 output.’
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Rishi Sunak might not have expected Sir Tony Blair to emerge as a net-zero sceptic, says the Telegraph (via MSN).

In the midst of a Tory battle over Britain’s carbon-reduction targets and the policies being used to get there, the last Labour leader to win a General Election sounded a note of caution.

Britain’s diminishing contribution to global CO2 emissions poses new questions in the fight against climate change, he suggested.

Climate crisis panel needed to avert global disasters, (alarmist) expert warns

Summary from PA (via STV): ‘Sir David King called for a global organisation akin to the WHO to steer humanity through the current climate crisis.’ — With a prominent role for himself, by any chance? One of his ‘big ideas’ (see full report) is to refreeze the Arctic, whatever that’s supposed to mean. If there’s a Climate Alarmist award, he’s a candidate.
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Countries should band together and form a world climate crisis organisation akin to the World Health Organisation (WHO), to steer humanity through the unfolding disasters associated with the heating planet, one of the UK’s leading climate scientists has said.

Sir David King, former UK chief scientific adviser and chairman of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, said it is now “almost certain” that the global average temperature will rise to at least 2C above pre-industrial levels, which scientists have warned could lead to further irreversible heating.

At 1.2C the Earth is already experiencing severe heatwaves, wildfires, storms, sea-level rise and species decline, with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres saying: “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.” [Talkshop comment – well, it’s been about 17C here in northern Britain today].

British professor elected to lead UN climate worriers

Climate scientists are now expected to become ‘forceful advocates for practical solutions’, says one commenter on the appointment. As usual, no mention of natural climate variation in media alarmist circles.
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British professor Jim Skea was elected to lead the UN’s climate expert panel Wednesday, taking the helm of the organization charged with distilling the best science to inform global policy in a critical decade for humans and the planet, reports Phys.org.

Skea, a Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College London who co-chaired the report on curbing planet-heating emissions in the latest round of assessments, was elected chair at a meeting of the 195-nation organization in Nairobi.

“Climate change is an existential threat to our planet,” he told delegates.

Heatwave hysteria – Net Zero Watch

Credit: nationalreview.com

Media headbangers seem to be in a constant race to the bottom to try and get the most attention-grabbing nonsensical climate alarm headlines out of the latest short-term weather phenomenon, whatever it may be. If truth is a casualty, they may fail to notice.
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Climate change extremism and the tendency to alarm first and analyse later is destroying clear and thoughtful environmental reporting, says David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

A good example of this is the European heatwave hysteria which was started by journalists confusing ground and air temperature.

It began with a report by the European Space Agency that referred to measured air temperatures above Europe.

The point of the press release was that it was very hot.

The Pacific slope of Peru is greening, say Cambridge researchers – but they don’t like it?

Andes mountain range

We’re told ‘the exact cause or resulting consequences of this greening are not known’, but the media spin says ‘it’s not good news’. The unhealthy obsession with climate gloom and doom in certain quarters has spilled over here. The massive and ongoing greening trend is decribed as ‘a warning sign, like the canary in the mine’ (which of course expires). Really?
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Research led by physicists and geographers at the University of Cambridge has unveiled some large-scale changes in the vegetation in the South American Andes which may have dramatic impact on the environment and ecosystems of the region, says Phys.org.

Analyzing satellite data spanning the past 20 years, the research team based at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge examined how vegetation has been changing along the Pacific coast of Peru and northern Chile.

This area is known for its unique and delicate arid and semi-arid environments.

Climate change fostered the rise and fall of the Tibetan Empire from 600 to 800 AD, researchers find

Tibetan Plateau region

Leading to an obvious question – what natural factors caused that? We read that ‘warm and humid climates promote the development of agriculture and animal husbandry on the plateau, while cold and arid conditions’…well, don’t. Climate alarmists take note.
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Results are in from a study led by Dr. Juzhi Hou, Dr. Fahu Chen, and Dr. Kejia Ji (Group of Alpine Paleoecology and Human Adaptation (ALPHA), State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Resources and Environment (TPESRE), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences), says Phys.org.

The research team obtained a high-resolution climate record of the past 2,000 years using the varved sediments of Lake JiangCo on the central Tibetan Plateau.

The warm and humid climate during the 7th-9th centuries AD and the subsequent cold and aridification are consistent with the rise and fall of the Tibetan Empire.

Research links climate change to ‘lazier’ jet stream, leading to extreme weather

Credit: The Weather Network

To what extent can ground conditions affect the weather, rather than the other way round? This study claims to have found something new, saying: ‘Since 2000, frequent “stuck” weather patterns have produced heat waves over Greenland, resulting in exceptional melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet’ – which begs the question: What started, or stopped, happening in or around 2000 to cause such patterns? The answer given is: ‘Observations have revealed a more prevalent negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)’. In other words, a natural phenomenon. Getting to the bottom of what the paper says depends partly on interpreting what they mean by statements like this: ‘One question is whether this is a consequence of climate change.’
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Jet streams are relatively narrow bands of strong wind in the upper atmosphere, typically occurring around 30,000 feet, and blowing west to east, says Phys.org.

Their normal flows lead to week-to-week weather variations, modulated in the mid-latitudes by ridges and troughs in the jet stream. A high-pressure ridge, for example, produces clear, warmer weather conditions; a trough is typically followed by stormy conditions.

Together, these form waves in the jet stream that can stall as the waves grow and become more amplified, causing “stuck” weather patterns that produce longer storms and heat waves.

New research published in Nature Communications describes observations linking increased warming at high latitudes and the ever-decreasing snow cover in North America to these stalls in atmospheric circulation.

Domestic oil and gas production would unlock funding for energy transition, fossil fuel firms tell government

North Sea gas rig [image credit: safety4sea.com]

Climate dogmatists can’t bear such ideas, but money doesn’t grow on trees. Meeting oil and gas demand mainly from imports is poor policy in many ways, but fixed ideas about trace gases in the atmosphere may prevail despite a glaring lack of economic rationality.
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Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), the trade body for the UK’s oil and gas companies and contractors, has today announced the sector could invest £200bn in technologies and projects critical to delivering on climate targets by the end of this decade – provided the government enables new oil and gas fields as well as offshore wind projects, reports Business Green.

In a new report released this morning, OEUK said the government can maximise the development of the UK’s offshore energy supply chain if it delivers on the policies set out in its British Energy Strategy, including its controversial promise to grant licenses for new domestic oil and gas production.

Countries Wage War Over Clean Energy Subsidies

On one side of the Atlantic: the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), on the other side: the Green New Deal. The gloves are off, but can the subsidy money be as enormous as indicated without massively stoking inflation? Besides, what possible climate benefit does anyone think they might see?
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Journalists are calling it a subsidy war, says OilPrice.com.

Those involved in it are keen to preserve an image of cooperation and agreement. Whatever you call it, it’s hard to deny the obvious: the United States and Europe are locked in a race—a subsidy race for the energy transition.

When Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act last summer, many companies had reason to celebrate: they were going to get generous financial support to build or expand their businesses as long as they fell into any “sustainable” category.

The mood was different in Europe. There, business leaders had reason to start worrying about one more thing: the increased competitiveness of U.S. goods thanks to the IRA and the consequent reduced competitiveness of their own goods.

Scientists Say More Marine Life Is Greening The Oceans, So Media Freak Out

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

Knee-jerk alarm goes up yet another notch in the climate-obsessed media. Look what *you’ve done*, they try to insinuate.
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Climate change is benefiting life in the oceans so much that ocean color is becoming noticeably greener as a result, scientists reported this week.

Bodies of water with little life tend to be bluer, the scientists observed, while bodies of water rich in life tend to be greener.

Responding to the wonderful news about the recent burst of ocean life, the media have instead sounded a breathless alarm leading people to believe that climate change making the oceans greener is bad, says Climate Realism (via Climate Change Dispatch).

The biggest myth about fossil fuels and dinosaurs, debunked by science

Credit: fuelfix.com

In case you weren’t quite sure…
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Is your car really powered by dinosaurs? – asks BBC Science Focus.

Most oil reserves were formed between 65 and 252 million years ago. While this does overlap with the ‘dinosaur times’, oil is a marine sediment made of the remains of algae and plankton.

Skeletons of prehistoric reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs (neither of which count as dinosaurs) have been found in the same geological layers as oil and they may have contaminated the oil deposit.

Beware the habitual El Niño hype – Net Zero Watch

Not hard to imagine so-called climate reporters with fingers hovering over the alarm button, ready to press it as soon as the first hint of an El Niño is mentioned somewhere.
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The world is once again in the grip of a semi-regular climate alarm, says David Whitehouse @ Net Zero Watch.

I’m not referring to the latest onset of the El Niño cycle, declared in action on July 4th by the United Nations, but the amplified rhetoric about the pace and scale of warming temperatures that always accompanies such El Niño periods.

Do you remember what happened last time we had a record El Niño in 2015/16? Global temperatures increased rapidly – as they do during such an event – and, according to some, it was full speed ahead to a runaway thermal apocalypse … until global temperatures started to fall again.

In Defence of Non-IPCC CO2 Science

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No matter what the evidence and reasoning put forward, the notion of modern CO2 increases *following* warming will always be a non-starter for climate alarmists.

Science Matters

Currently some Zero Carbon zealots are trying to discredit and disappear a peer reviewed study of CO2 atmospheric concentrations because its findings contradict IPCC dogma.  The paper is World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018). by Skrable et al. (2022).  The link is to the paper and also shows the comments recently addressed to the authors and the editor of the journal, as well as responses by both.

This came to my attention by way of a comment by one of the attackers on my 2022 post regarding this study.  Text is below in italics with my bolds.

D. Andrews 10/7/2023

This post is over a year old, but in the interest of correcting the record, please note the following:
1. Skrable et al. have conceded that the data they “guesstimated” bore little resemblance to actual atmospheric radiocarbon data.

2. In…

View original post 3,897 more words

Pyrotechnic Pandemonium: Wind Turbines Can’t Help Exploding In Toxic Fireballs

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“There’s a lot of oil up there”. One for deluded anti-oil protesters to ponder.

STOP THESE THINGS

Wind turbines love exploding into toxic fireballs that firefighters don’t even bother putting out. It’s a case of burn, baby burn when these things self-immolate.

The staggering rise in the number of turbine fires and total turbine collapses has caused insurers to ramp up the premiums they require to insure them.

Understandably, neighbours are getting sick and tired of being covered with palls of toxic smoke when these things burst into flames.

This time the pyrotechnic pandemonium takes place in Ontario.

Wind turbine blaze ‘contained’ north of Goderich, Ont.
London CTV
Scott Miller
4 June 2023

Todd Edginton could hardly believe his eyes when he looked out his back door to find a wind turbine on fire. He wasn’t alone, as people stopped just north of Goderich to see the spectacle unfold.

“I was going back to the cottage along Highway 21 from Goderich, and saw this. I said…

View original post 520 more words

New legal challenge to UK Government’s climate plans

Making climate targets legally enforceable turns out not to be such a smart idea, except for fee-seeking lawyers. Who knew?
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THREE ORGANISATIONS are taking the UK Government to court for the second time in under two years over its ‘feeble and inadequate’ strategy for tackling climate change, says Ekklesia.

Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and Good Law Project say the government’s revised net zero strategy – the Carbon Budget Delivery Plan, published on 30 March – is unlawful and have filed papers at the High Court requesting a judicial review.

The news follows a damning progress report from the Climate Change Committee, published on 28 June, which found there are only credible plans for less than a fifth of the emissions cuts needed to meet the UK’s legally binding climate targets.

This is down from the government’s independent climate advisors assessment last year that just 39 per cent of plans were fit for purpose.

Matt Ridley: I’ll buy a new petrol car in 2029

The rush to electric vehicles risks killing our car industry, shackling us to China and bumping up our taxes to reduce global emissions by just 0.044%. That’s why I’ll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban

Daily Mail July 8

BMW i3 electric car plus battery pack [image credit: carmagazine.co.uk]

Britain’s electric vehicle transition and the ban on petrol car sales from 2030 are a slow-motion car crash. The technology is not ready, the cost will be vast, the logistics are forbidding, the reliance on China is worrying and the backlash from the public is likely to be harsh.

Worst of all, the benefits are derisory at best and may not even exist.

Yes, you read that right. It is possible that we could replace all of Britain’s cars and vans with electric vehicles and still find that carbon dioxide emissions are higher, not lower. Cost-benefit, hello?

Is it the climate, or climate alarmism, that may be ‘out of control’?

Credit: University of Maine

According to the UN, it’s the climate – meaning they want to imply human intervention in it. Of course that’s what they always say, whenever some factoid suitable for cherrypicking turns up. Nothing they say sheds any light on the real factors behind the latest weather. Count the coulds, mights and maybes here as experts caution against over-interpreting machine data.
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The average temperature of the Earth might have hit record highs this week, according to an unofficial analysis, says DW.com.

The news comes as several regions experience intense heat waves. [Talkshop comment – welcome to NH summer].

Earth’s average temperature again reached a record level on Thursday, according to satellite data and computer simulations processed at a US university.

The Climate Reanalyzer at the University of Maine recorded a planetary average of 17.23 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit), beating the record 17.18 C mark reached on Tuesday and Wednesday.

More hydrogen hype as new British truck unveiled

Credit: Scottish Power

‘Could a truck that’s powered by hydrogen and only emits water help in the climate change fight?’ – asks Sky News. Two problems there – ‘only emits water’ doesn’t tell the whole story as unwelcome nitrogen oxide comes into play, and ‘climate change fight’ belongs to mythology. Another difficulty (quote): ‘hydrogen still has problems as a power source. Making it from green electricity is currently expensive and far less energy efficient than plugging a battery into a charging point.’ Also (quote): ‘a switch to hydrogen would need 35.6GW of electricity to make it’ – over three times more than needed for comparable battery charging, according to the report.
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Summary: The vehicle can be fuelled up with hydrogen in just 15 minutes and gives drivers 600 miles of range, the company behind it says, with the gas being stored in high pressure tanks designed to withstand impact.
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British trials have started of a heavyweight truck powered by a gas that’s lighter than air – and emits nothing but water.

Sky News was given exclusive access to the first British designed and built heavy goods vehicle (HGV) to be fuelled by hydrogen as it was driven around the Horiba Mira test track in Warwickshire.

The Scottish manufacturers, HVS, say the truck could help decarbonise the road freight industry, which produces more than 21 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year in the UK alone.