Study Shows Electric Cars Become Practically Useless In Cold Weather

Teslas in Norway [image credit: Norsk Elbilforening (Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association)]

EVs are looking like yet another ‘save the planet’ fiasco in the making. Some of the points made here were already known, but these studies reinforce them. As many EVs on the road are still relatively new, the full extent of any problems may not yet be clear. With the help of large subsidies and other incentives they sell well in Norway despite the cold winters there.

According to recent studies, cold temperatures significantly reduce the performance of electric cars, especially when it comes to battery life.

One study by AAA suggested that cold temperatures can reduce the range of the batteries in most electric cars by over 40 percent, reports Anonymous News.

It was also noted that the performance can be even worse when the interior heaters are used.

Resonances of the first (pulsar) exoplanetary system ever found

Poster from the NASA Exoplanets Exploration Program’s Exoplanet Travel Bureau [credit: NASA/JPL-CalTech]

Before we start – ‘Pulsar planets are planets that are found orbiting pulsars, or rapidly rotating neutron stars.’

Wikipedia tells us:
‘PSR B1257+12, previously designated PSR 1257+12, […] is a pulsar located 2,300 light-years from the Sun in the constellation of Virgo. It is also named Lich, after a powerful, fictional undead creature of the same name.

The pulsar has a planetary system with three known planets, named “Draugr” (PSR B1257+12 b or PSR B1257+12 A), “Poltergeist” (PSR B1257+12 c, or PSR B1257+12 B) and “Phobetor” (PSR B1257+12 d, or PSR B1257+12 C), respectively.

They were both the first extrasolar planets and the first pulsar planets to be discovered; B and C in 1992 and A in 1994.

A is the lowest-mass planet yet discovered by any observational technique, with somewhat less than twice the mass of Earth’s moon.’

Stardust in the Antarctic snow: Iron-60 discovery in the Antarctic provides information on the environment of solar system

Image credit: extremetech.com

A 2016 article in Astronomy Now reported:
“Scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms, said research leader Dr. Anton Wallner from The Australian National University (ANU).

“We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years,” said Dr. Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. “It suggests there were a series of supernovae, one after another.

“It’s an interesting coincidence that they correspond with when the Earth cooled and moved from the Pliocene into the Pleistocene period.” [bold added]

In August this year a new find was reported…
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The rare isotope iron-60 is created in massive stellar explosions, says ScienceDaily. Only a very small amount of this isotope reaches the earth from distant stars.

COLD WATER? The Oceans and Climate Change – Dr David Whitehouse

The full GWPF paper is here. Needless to say, it offers little comfort to ‘man-made warming’ climate dogmatists. The author concludes that what is happening to the oceans today is not unusual, in historical terms.

Executive summary

• The study of ocean heat content (OHC) is a subject struggling with inadequate data, but exposed in a public forum.

• Only since the introduction of data from the Argo array have there been convincing estimates of errors. The inhomogeneity of different data sets is a major problem.

• There is no real understanding of the difference between random and systematic errors in OHC data.

• Changes in OHC are at the limits of our ability to measure, and made with much uncertainty and many unknowns.

Tallbloke talking about climate and energy on PlusNews live TV

Yesterday I got the opportunity to have a relaxed climate conversation with Stephen Place, who presents the ‘Talking Yorkshire’ programme on PlusNews TV, a community based channel going out on 15 live platforms worldwide, youtube and on facebook. Make a pot of coffee and check it out.

Pielke Jr.: Net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 requires a new nuclear power plant every day

Ringhals nuclear power site, Sweden [image credit: Vattenfall]

Or, theoretically at least, an equivalent amount of power from other so-called ‘green’ sources, requiring vastly greater amounts of non-renewable mined materials than are currently available – assuming they even exist on such large scales. Not to mention all the other practical difficulties of such dodgy ideas.

What makes achieving Net Zero by 2050 impossible is a failure to accurately understand the scale of the challenge and the absence of policy proposals that match that scale, says Roger Pielke Jr. @ Forbes (via The GWPF).

More than a decade ago, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner characterized climate policy as an “auction of promises” in which politicians “vied to outbid each other with proposed emissions targets that were simply not achievable.”

For instance, among Democrats competing for the presidency in 2020, several, including Joe Biden, have committed to achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Candidate Andrew Yang bid 2049, and Cory Booker topped that by offering 2045. Bernie Sanders has offered a 71% reduction by 2030.

One reason that we see this “auction of promises” is that the targets and timetables for emissions reductions are easy to state but difficult to comprehend.

Geochemists measure new composition of Earth’s mantle

The grand cliffs of the island of São Jorge, formed by fissural volcanism. [Credit: Azores @ Wikipedia]

New research suggests that ‘the composition of Earth’s entire mantle may differ from current thinking’. More work for theorists beckons.

What is the chemical composition of the Earth’s interior?

Because it is impossible to drill more than about ten kilometres deep into the Earth, volcanic rocks formed by melting Earth’s deep interior often provide such information, says Phys.org.

Geochemists at the Universities of Münster (Germany) and Amsterdam (Netherlands) have investigated the volcanic rocks that build up the Portuguese island group of the Azores.

Their goal: gather new information about the compositional evolution of the Earth’s mantle, which is the layer roughly between 30 and 2,900 kilometres deep inside the Earth.

National Grid’s Preliminary Report On Blackout

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Thanks to Paul Homewood for the initial analysis. Note that module 1 of Hornsea wind farm operated normally throughout, even though modules 2 and 3 cut out.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://www.nationalgrideso.com/information-about-great-britains-energy-system-and-electricity-system-operator-eso

Key points:

• Lightning was the original cause, even though such strikes are perfectly common, and do not usually result in such catastrophic blackouts
• Hornsea wind farm tripped first, contrary to original reports.
• They still don’t seem to know exactly why either Hornsea or Little Barford tripped, though it was obviously due to the lightning.
• Along with the loss of 500MW of small embedded generation (wind and solar), the total loss was about 1878MW
• National Grid has 1000MW of automatic back up power available, incl 472MW of battery storage. Clearly this was not enough.
• Following the lightning strike, the grid’s protection systems worked properly

Certain aspects don’t seem to have been highlighted:

• When Hornsea wind farm is fully operational in the next year or so, it will have capacity of 1200MW. In addition, Hornsea Project 2, due on line in 2024, will have an additional 1386MW capacity…

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TESS discovers habitable zone planet in GJ 357 system

Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith

Following the report we analyse the orbital data for evidence of resonances.

A planet discovered by NASA’s TESS has pointed the way to additional worlds orbiting the same star, one of which is located in the star’s habitable zone, reports SciTechDaily.

If made of rock, this planet may be around twice Earth’s size.

The new worlds orbit a star named GJ 357, an M-type dwarf about one-third the Sun’s mass and size and about 40% cooler that our star. The system is located 31 light-years away in the constellation Hydra.

In February, TESS cameras caught the star dimming slightly every 3.9 days, revealing the presence of a transiting exoplanet — a world beyond our solar system — that passes across the face of its star during every orbit and briefly dims the star’s light.

Global energy demand to double by 2050

While many richer countries play fake climate games with their so-called ‘virtue signalling’ energy policies, the not-so-well-off majority try to get more access to those same power sources which are so necessary for better living conditions, e.g. air conditioning in hotter countries, and for general prosperity and health: more schools, hospitals, roads and all the rest.

Global power consumption will more than double over the next 30 years, says The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

Global oil and gas demand will respectively surge 22% and 66% from 2020 to 2050. There’s an unimaginable urbanization boom occurring around the world that means more energy use.

We, of course, don’t see much of it here in the West, but global cities swell in population by some 80 million people every year: e.g., the rise of the “megacity” with 10 million residents.

Basically all population growth in the decades ahead will take place in urban areas, all of which will be in the still developing nations (non-OECD), where poverty and insufficient access to energy is far more rampant than our worst nightmares could ever imagine.

Why Phi? – exoplanetary resonances of Kepler-102

Kepler Space Telescope [credit: NASA]

Star Kepler-102 has five known planets, lettered b,c,d,e,f. These all have short-period orbits between 5 and 28 days. Going directly to the orbit period numbers we find:
345 b = 1824.0012 d
258 c = 1824.4263 d
177 d = 1825.1709 d
113 e = 1824.4629 d
(for comparison: about 1-2 days short of 5 Earth years)

For the purposes of this post planet f (the furthest of the five from its star) is excluded, except to say that in terms of conjunctions 8 e-f = 11 d-e. Now let’s look for some resonances of the inner four planets.

Why Phi? – the three planets of the Kepler-47 circumbinary planet system

Kepler-47 system [Image Credit: NASA/JPL Caltech/T. Pyle]

Astronomers have discovered a third planet in the Kepler-47 system, securing the system’s title as the most interesting of the binary-star worlds, says NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration team.

Using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, a team of researchers, led by astronomers at San Diego State University, detected the new Neptune-to-Saturn-size planet orbiting between two previously known planets.

With its three planets orbiting two suns, Kepler-47 is the only known multi-planet circumbinary system. Circumbinary planets are those that orbit two stars.

Continued here.
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Now at the Talkshop let’s take a quick look at the data.

Chinese UHI study finds 0.34C/century inflation effect on average temperature estimate.

New study published by Springer today makes interesting reading. Phil Jones’ ears will be burning brightly.

Abstract:
Historical temperature records are often partially biased by the urban heat island (UHI) effect. However, the exact magnitude of these biases is an ongoing, controversial scientific question, especially in regions like China where urbanization has greatly increased in recent decades. Previous studies have mainly used statistical information and selected static population targets, or urban areas in a particular year, to classify urban-rural stations and estimate the influence of urbanization on observed warming trends. However, there is a lack of consideration for the dynamic processes of urbanization. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH), Yangtze River Delta (YRD), and Pearl River Delta (PRD) are three major urban agglomerations in China which were selected to investigate the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of urban expansion effects on observed warming trends in this study. Based on remote sensing (RS) data, urban area expansion processes were taken into consideration and the relationship between urban expansion rates and warming trends was investigated using data from 975 meteorological stations throughout China.

Claim: EVs not the best option for reduction in on-road CO2 in Germany given power mix

Even assuming CO2 reduction to be a worthwhile policy, which is far from certain, electric vehicles may be far from an ideal option despite vast investments in the technology by many car firms, as Green Car Congress reports. Part of the supposed problem of course is that much electricity still comes from fuel-burning power stations.

According to a new study published by the ifo Institute Center for Economic Studies (CESifo) in Germany, EVs will barely help cut CO2 emissions in the country over the coming years, as the introduction of electric vehicles does not necessarily lead to a reduction in CO2 emissions from road traffic given the current power generation mix.

Natural climate processes overshadow recent human-induced Walker circulation trends

Credit: PAR @ Wikipedia

If you think you saw something about this a few days ago, you’re right. This article is a sort of follow-up that has appeared in Nature Climate Change on 1st April [sic] – abstract here. The ‘recent human-induced Walker circulation trends’ in the headline seem to be an artefact of some of the climate models, judging by the report. The authors make a telling point: ‘In contrast to the observed strengthening, the majority of climate computer models simulate a gradual weakening of the Walker Circulation when forced by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations’. So they got it exactly backwards? How unfortunate.

A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, shows that the recent intensification of the equatorial Pacific wind system, known as Walker Circulation, is unrelated to human influences and can be explained by natural processes, reports Phys.org.

This result ends a longstanding debate on the drivers of an unprecedented atmospheric trend, which contributed to a three-fold acceleration of sea level rise in the western tropical Pacific, as well as to the global warming hiatus.

Henrik Svensmark: FORCE MAJEURE The Sun’s Role in Climate Change

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The author writes in his 40-page document: ‘This report is not meant to be an exhaustive representation of all the published papers related to a solar influence on Earth’s climate, but aims to give a clear presentation of the current knowledge on the link between solar activity and climate.’

Where does cosmic ray variation fit into the ‘big picture’ of solar influences on the Earth?

The Next Grand Minimum

I am still studying this paper but wanted to share and get your feedback

Executive Summary

Over the last twenty years there has been good progress in understanding the solar influ- ence on climate. In particular, many scientific studies have shown that changes in solar activ- ity have impacted climate over the whole Holocene period (approximately the last 10,000 years). A well-known example is the existence of high solar activity during the Medieval Warm Period, around the year 1000 AD, and the subsequent low levels of solar activity during the cold period, now called The Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD). An important scientific task has been to quantify the solar impact on climate, and it has been found that over the eleven- year solar cycle the energy that enters the Earth’s system is of the order of 1.0–1.5 W/m2. This is nearly an order of magnitude larger than what would be…

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What are the opponents of Donald Trump’s climate review committee afraid of?

Credit: nationalreview.com

Dr Roy Spencer tries to strike a note of sanity amidst the latest bout of doom-laden climate hysteria doing the rounds via cynical manipulation of the minds of school kids. What is accelerating is the bluster of alarmists, who lack credible empirical evidence of ‘human-caused’ as opposed to natural climate variation.

On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims.

Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled”, writes Roy Spencer in The Washington Times.

But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?

Reassessment of climate change finding mooted by White House

White House plans to assemble a group of federal scientists to RE-EVALUATE climate science: https://t.co/XcquZXY25i
As a federal scientist, I could participate in this group.
Ask President Trump to consider our Discovery about the "Greenhouse Effect":
https://t.co/K2GW8tmBjA

— Ned Nikolov, Ph.D. (@NikolovScience) February 25, 2019

Help Ned by emailing the White House to recommend his inclusion on the panel.

About time too!

Study: how the Little Ice Age impacted parts of Australia

Queensland, Australia

The cause(s) of the Little Ice Age is (are) uncertain, but Wikipedia puts forward some ideas with varying degrees of plausibility, including ‘inherent variability in global climate’ (indeed), and ‘decreases in the human population’ (what?). Now some interesting evidence of it has been found in Australia.

A study by University of Adelaide researchers and Queensland Government scientists has revealed what south-east Queensland’s rainfall was like over the last 7000 years – including several severe droughts worse and longer lasting than the 12-year Millennium Drought, reports Phys.org.

The study – published in Scientific Reports—used preserved paper-bark tea tree leaves from North Stradbroke Island’s Swallow Lagoon that have been collecting in the sediment for the past 7700 years.

MET-Office update: There is no update.

In the meantime, here’s how the 2016-2021 forecast (in blue) is doing compared to the latest data (red trace).

Last year, I wrote a short post entitled Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method, in which I showed how the MET-Office would always update their ‘decadal’ (actually semi-decadal) climate prediction before the data caught up with them.

At the time, they were promising to update their prediction in January of this year. But they haven’t, despite describing themselves as “WMO Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction“. So instead, I’ve done a retrospective update of the data on their 2016 to 2021″decadal” prediction.