The crews bracing themselves for a rise in electric car fires

Firefighter: “Our preferred approach is to let them burn themselves out”. EV fires ‘create a variety of toxic chemicals’. They ‘have to be “quarantined” away from other vehicles even after the fire appears to have been put out’, in case they re-ignite days or even 2-3 weeks later. Other types of car are still available, but in increasingly restricted numbers due to so-called climate policies.
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Each year, Essex Fire and Rescue Service focuses on one area of “top-up” training for its crews, says BBC News.

In recent years, this has included sessions on firefighting at height and managing hazardous materials.

This year, a new course is being introduced: How to deal with electric vehicle fires. Why?

The State of the Climate 2023 (GWPF) – evidence of crisis not observed

The summary remarks: ‘There is no visible effect of the global COVID-19 lockdown 2020–2021 in the atmospheric concentration. The increasing amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide is enhancing photosynthesis and thereby global crop yields.’
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London, 28 March — In his annual review of the state of the global climate, Professor Ole Humlum reviews last year’s key data and observations in the context of long-term climate trends, says the GWPF.

The review covers a wide range of temperature measurements in both ocean and atmosphere, alongside reviews of oceanic oscillations, sea level, snow and ice measurements and storms.

In the new world of EVs and AI, renewable green energy means more gas or coal capacity, not less

Technology demands are outrunning misguided climate/energy policies. ‘Officials admit – more hogs means a bigger trough’ (Telegraph) but laws of physics can’t be overridden by government demands, however much they insist on barking up the wrong tree with puny renewables and rejecting available fuel sources.
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It is no secret that the expanding suite of AI technologies are becoming powerful drivers of additional demand for electricity, says The Telegraph.

They are, simply put, enormous energy hogs.

This technological revolution seems destined to soon overwhelm and dominate almost every aspect of modern society, but there’s a catch: It is taking place simultaneously with coordinated efforts by national and international governments to prematurely do away with some of the cheapest and most abundant forms of 24/7 power generation.

The energy hogs, in other words, are lined up at the electricity trough, but that trough is being forced to run dry by ill-considered public policies.

Climate change ‘could’ affect timekeeping, study says

The BBC wants this to be all about the climate, but the study is also pushing the propaganda boat out a long way by claiming that ‘we’ are the cause. It’s known that the Earth’s rotation isn’t constant. ‘In 2022 the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), the organization responsible for global timekeeping, voted to abolish leap seconds by 2035. How this new research could impact such a decision remains to be seen.’ Source – Scientific American, which also has this:
“Despite our perceptions as humans, the Earth is not a perfect timekeeper,” says Harvard University geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica, who reviewed the new study and co-wrote a commentary on it for Nature. He says these findings highlight the divide between our lived experience and the technology that surrounds us. “How do we handle that divide?” he says. “Do we continue to address this divide by adding or subtracting seconds from our definition of a day, or do we accept this irregular difference as normal and give up the bother of continuously correcting?” — If it’s normal, the human causation argument looks even weaker.
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Climate change is affecting the speed of the Earth’s rotation and could impact how we keep time, a study says.

Accelerating melt from Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the world’s seas, redistributing mass, reports BBC News.

That is very slightly slowing the Earth’s rotation. But the planet is still spinning faster than it used to.

The effect is that global timekeepers may need to subtract a second from our clocks later than would otherwise have been the case.

“Global warming is already affecting global timekeeping,” says the study, published in the journal Nature.

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – which is used by most of the world to regulate clocks and time – is calculated by the Earth’s rotation.

But the Earth’s rotation rate is not constant and can therefore have an effect on how long our days and nights are.

As a result, since the 1970s around 27 seconds – known as leap seconds – have been added on to keep our time accurate.

The study finds that a “negative leap second” – subtracting a second from world clocks – would have been needed in 2026 without accelerating polar ice melt.

But now, with ice sheets losing mass five times faster than they were 30 years ago, this change is needed in 2029, the study suggests.

“It’s kind of impressive, even to me, we’ve done something that measurably changes how fast the Earth rotates,” Duncan Agnew, the author of the study, told NBC News. [Talkshop comment – ‘we’?]

Full report here.

Polar vortex is ‘spinning backwards’ above Arctic after major reversal event

The new polar vortex blog hosted by NOAA says ‘some winters come and go without a single interesting thing happening in the stratosphere’, but this one wasn’t one of those. The blog also notes: ‘Odds of polar vortex collapse boosted during El Niño…But not all the El Niños’. The article below says ‘Changes to the polar vortex influence the jet stream, which can in turn impact weather across the Northern Hemisphere’ (caption to NOAA graphic).
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The polar vortex circling the Arctic is swirling in the wrong direction after surprise warming in the upper atmosphere triggered a major reversal event earlier this month, says Live Science.

It is one of the most extreme atmospheric U-turns seen in recent memory.

In the past, disruptions to the polar vortex — a rotating mass of cold air that circles the Arctic — have triggered extremely cold weather and storms across large parts of the U.S.

The current change in the vortex’s direction probably won’t lead to a similar “big freeze.” But the sudden switch-up has caused a record-breaking “ozone spike” above the North Pole.

Labour’s net zero target faces £116bn ‘investment challenge’

Challenge is putting it mildly. Cloud cuckoo land beckons once again in the form of impossible but supposedly climate-related targets. Some timescales are hard to shorten just by uttering demands.
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A report by Policy Exchange, supported by analysis from Aurora Energy Research, outlines challenges facing Labour’s aim to achieve a decarbonised power grid by 2030, says Energy Live News.

The report highlights a £116 billion additional investment requirement.

This finding, based on modelling, emphasises obstacles such as planning reforms, supply chain limitations and workforce shortages.

The analysis underscores difficulties in accelerating renewable energy deployment and scaling up infrastructure.

X-class flare as two sunspots explode in tandem

A Sympathetic X-class Solar Flare

Solar maximum part two on the way.

Viewers ‘very sad’ after Sky’s climate show gets the chop – but too many non-viewers

Commercial failure, it seems. Never mind, there’s always the weather forecast.
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Viewers have expressed their devastation after BBC presenter Tom Heap revealed his Sky News show had been cancelled, says Metro News.

The Countryfile host, 58, presented the last episode of The Climate Show on Saturday and announced it had been axed after two years on air.

Tom shared the clip of his ‘pithy final line’, prompting an outpouring of disappointment from his X follower who branded the show ‘important’ amid the escalating [Talkshop comment – only in the media?] climate change crisis.

Confused over the show’s end, account @Earth2075 remarked: ‘Why? It seems now is a more important time than ever.’
. . .
Ending the final The Climate Show, Tom said: ‘And that is it for The Climate Show. This is our final outing.’

Full article here.

How China captured the sun – and cast a shadow over Europe

UK plans mean ‘we will be covering an area of countryside the size of Middlesex with Chinese solar panels’ by 2035, while China’s market share in the EU has reached 97%. Can energy/climate policymakers explain what is supposed to happen to all these millions of panels at replacement time?
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Europe’s ambitious plans to expand green energy generation with “Made in EU” solar panels face a distinctly cloudy future as the continent faces a massive glut of the devices, says The Telegraph (via Yahoo News).

Millions of solar panels are piling up in warehouses across the Continent because of a manufacturing battle in China, where cut-throat competition has driven the world’s biggest panel-makers to expand production far faster than they can be installed.

The supply glut has caused solar panel prices to halve.

UN warns against thirsty tech to solve water crisis – ‘carbon’ capture, AI and lithium in the frame

Drought conditions in Northern China

Is lithium more of a problem than a solution? Climate worriers wouldn’t like that as it goes against their visions of a battery-filled future.
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The world needs to better manage its freshwater resources, says AFP (via Phys.org), but thirsty new technologies touted as solutions could lead to “serious problems” if left unchecked, a UN report warned Friday.

Roughly half of the planet’s population is facing grave water shortages, with climate change-linked droughts affecting more than 1.4 billion people between 2002 and 2021, the report for the UN cultural agency UNESCO said.

As of 2022, more than 2 billion people were without access to safely managed drinking water, while 3.5 billion people lacked access to decent toilets, it added.
. . .
The report, titled “Water for prosperity and peace”, called for more water education, data collection and investment to address the crisis.
. . .
It also highlighted the limits of new computer-led solutions.

Climate the Movie is here.

Eight years ago, talkshop readers helped film maker Martin Durkin finance ‘Brexit the Movie‘, raising over £8000 towards the total cost of production. Now, Martin has made the long awaited sequel to ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle‘ with help from long time fellow sceptic Tom Nelson. It’s called ‘Climate the Movie: the Cold Truth’ and you can watch it for free here, right now. Enjoy!

Available at Vimeo vimeo.com/924719370
On X at twitter.com/TomANelson/status/1771682333738848477
On Youtube at youtube.com/watch?v=zmfRG8-RHEI
On Rumble at rumble.com/v4kl0dn-climate-the-movie-the-cold-truth-martin-durkin.html

UN weather agency cranks up the climate alarm as global temperatures rise by a small fraction of a degree

Everything about climate, other than some mythical past optimum, is branded as an actual or potential disaster by carbon dioxide demonisers like the WMO. Try not to yawn.
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GENEVA (AP, via PBS Online.) — The U.N. weather agency is sounding a “red alert” about global warming, citing record-smashing increases last year in greenhouse gases, land and water temperatures and melting of glaciers and sea ice, and is warning that the world’s efforts to reverse the trend have been inadequate.

The World Meteorological Organization said there is a “high probability” that 2024 will be another record-hot year.

The Geneva-based agency, in a “State of the Global Climate” report released Tuesday, ratcheted up concerns that a much-vaunted climate goal is increasingly in jeopardy: That the world can unite to limit planetary warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels. [Talkshop comment – meaning Little Ice Age levels].

Climate protesters in England and Wales lose criminal damage defence

Appeal court says defendants’ ‘beliefs and motivation’ do not constitute lawful excuse for damaging property. They may think their imaginary weather scenarios, supposedly based on climate models and ‘greenhouse effects’, should be taken seriously but the rest of the world has no obligation to do so.
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One of the last defences for climate protesters who commit criminal damage has been in effect removed by the court of appeal, says The Guardian.

The court said the “beliefs and motivation” of a defendant do not constitute lawful excuse for causing damage to a property.

The defence that a person honestly believes the owner of a property would have consented had they known the full circumstances of climate change has been used successfully over the last year by protesters.

Scientists divided over ‘record heat’

Is ‘speed of change’ a problem? Climate models make predictions, but the reality is quite often something else. Solar activity including flares has been high in the last year or so, but this is often ignored. CO2 theory struggles with anomalies.
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Record temperatures in 2024 on land and at sea have prompted scientists to question whether these anomalies are in line with predicted global heating patterns or if they represent a concerning acceleration of climate breakdown, says The Guardian.

Heat above the oceans remains persistently, freakishly high, despite a weakening of El Niño, which has been one of the major drivers of record global temperatures over the past year.

Scientists are divided about the extraordinary temperatures of marine air.

Climate change: The ‘insane’ plan to save the Arctic’s sea-ice

Is this just another toytown publicity stunt to keep promoting the notion that there’s some climate problem, supposedly caused by human activities, requiring urgent corrective measures?
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Perched on sea-ice off Canada’s northern coast, parka-clad scientists watch saltwater pump out over the frozen ocean.

Their goal? To slow global warming, says BBC News.

As sea-ice vanishes, the dark ocean surface can absorb more of the Sun’s energy, which accelerates warming. So the researchers want to thicken it to stop it melting away.

UK carbon capture strategy ‘outdated and unrealistic’ as costs doubled

The policy was unrealistic even before it became outdated. The costs have already put most climate-obsessed countries off, and the UK can’t avoid that barrier either.
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The UK Government’s energy policy centred around carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) is outdated and unrealistic, a new report has warned.

Think tank Carbon Tracker has today said that cost estimates for deploying CCUS have more than doubled from the £20bn in taxpayer funding initially scoped in December last year, reports City AM.

This strategy was based on the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, published in the sixth carbon budget in December 2020.

Nuclear fusion for the grid is coming much sooner than you think – Telegraph

Credit: ITER

Nuclear fusion has been pursued for decades, but is it now ‘time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be’ as the author suggests?
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Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade, claims The Telegraph.

Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.

Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.

UK faces ‘blackouts’ without new gas-fired power stations, ministers claim

That’s more a statement of fact than a claim, but climate obsessives often ignore inconvenient truths. The proposal is for ‘peaker’ type plants (like this) to replace some of the UK’s ageing baseload ones.
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The UK will face “blackouts” without building new gas power stations, ministers have claimed.

The government has said that while it will continue to move forward with its net zero targets and a focus on renewables, gas was needed as a “back-up” – with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak saying climate goals must be reached “in a sustainable way that doesn’t leave people without energy on a cloudy, windless day”, reports Sky News.

Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho will outline the plans for new stations in a speech later today, which include a full review of the electricity market and changes to the law to make the plants ready convert to low-carbon alternatives.

We must end the Net Zero delusion before it’s too late – Telegraph

Enough of the pretence, says the paper. It’s only arguing about methods of implementation e.g. targets, but better than nothing. The central plan is a drag on the whole country in the name of a climate theory that can’t be shown to be valid, using climate models that can’t even model the past or present with the necessary accuracy.
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Political obituaries will not be kind to Theresa May, says The Telegraph.

But there is one unwritten law of modern British politics the former prime minister understood: you can be wrong on climate change, provided you are wrong in the right way.

Whisper that net zero by 2050 will have deleterious social and economic costs, and accusations of “denialism” will swiftly follow.

Yet warn that the “house is on fire” and the end time is at hand, and you’ll probably be given a book deal.

An increase in the number of extreme cold days in North China during 2003–2012, research finds

The researchers wrestle with the non-correlation of extreme winter weather events and the monotonic increase in CO2 levels, offering a verdict of ‘probable’ natural variation. They try to support IPCC climate assertions, but the article keeps saying ‘however’. One of the study’s authors says: “This is still a challenging issue that needs further exploration to quantify the relative contributions of natural variability and human activity to regional extreme events.”
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A recent study by researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, presents robust interdecadal changes in the number of extreme cold days in winter over North China during 1989–2021, and the findings have been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters, says EurekAlert.

Specifically, the number of extreme cold days increased around the year 2003 and then decreased around the year 2013, with a value of 8.7 days per year during 1989–2002, 13.5 during 2003–2012, and 6.6 during 2013–2021.

During 2003–2012, the Siberian–Ural High strengthened and the polar jet stream weakened, which favored frequent cold air intrusion into North China, inducing more extreme cold days. In addition, the intensity of extreme cold days in North China showed no significant difference in the three periods.