Alarmist dismay as US Supreme Court rules against EPA on climate regulation powers

Verdict [image credit: coindesk.com]

Democracy overseeing the flow of EPA climate edicts? A ‘huge blow’, say alarmists, as over-the-top reactions from some of the usual suspects pour in.
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This means Congress will now have to pass off on any climate regulations, says Energy Live News.

In what’s been considered a blow to climate mitigation in the US, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This means the EPA will now be limited in how it can regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and help stave off global warming in the country.

Research shows tropical cyclones forming globally decreased by about 13% during the 20th century compared to the 19th

Landfalling hurricane [credit: NOAA]

A reconstructed record of cyclone activity going as far back as 1850 doesn’t show what climate alarmists, with their assertions of ‘human-induced’ global warming, might have expected. The intensity question is left for future research. The researchers note that ‘For most tropical cyclone basins (regions where they occur more regularly), including Australia, the decline has accelerated since the 1950s. Importantly, this is when human-induced warming also accelerated.’ [Or so they believe.] ‘The only exception to the trend is the North Atlantic basin’. Of course detailed historical records of natural climate variation may also be hard to find.
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The annual number of tropical cyclones forming globally decreased by about 13% during the 20th century compared to the 19th, according to research published today in Nature Climate Change.

Tropical cyclones are massive low-pressure systems that form in tropical waters when the underlying environmental conditions are right, says The Conversation.

These conditions include (but aren’t limited to) sea surface temperature, and variables such as vertical wind shear, which refers to changes in wind speed and direction with altitude.

California emissions, carbon neutrality plan draws criticism

Los Angeles, CA

Desperately seeking ‘carbon’ capture. One of the obvious problems of course is that it’s energy-intensive, and that energy has to be generated by non-fossil sources to qualify as suitable for the job, in the eyes of climate obsessives. Ignoring other practical difficulties (storage etc.), where is all the extra power supposed to come from? If wealthy California can’t resolve such issues, most other climate-obsessed regions (excluding those with lots of hydro-power) will surely also struggle to do so, and it all has to be paid for. For ‘ambitious’ read ‘unworkable’?
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California air regulators are likely to hear a barrage of criticism Thursday on a plan to slash fossil fuel use and reach carbon neutrality by 2045, a proposal that would require a sweeping shift in how the state powers its massive economy in the face of climate change, says Phys.org.

It will be the California Air Resources Board’s first public discussion of this year’s draft scoping plan, which is updated every five years and lays out a roadmap for the state to reach its climate goals.

The 2045 goal is among the most ambitious in the nation, but the proposal has many critics beyond the oil industry, which says the strategy has too many bans and mandates.

Net-zero US carbon goal is unattainable – Washington Examiner

The net zero emissions concept is once again exposed as a Hollywood-type fantasy. Regardless of whether carbon dioxide is seen as a credible climate problem or not, it just isn’t achievable in time.
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The goal of the U.S. government is to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, per the Paris agreement, says the Washington Examiner.

A three-step analysis establishes this as an impossible goal.

Three possible alternatives — wind, nuclear power, and utility photovoltaic solar (PV) — are analyzed separately in a three-step process to determine the amount of new capacity needed for any of them to meet net-zero carbon by 2050.

The same process then is used to determine whether any combination of the three can achieve the goal.

Is the UK on track to meet its ‘net zero’ targets?

The COP 26 climate jamboree has been and gone, and the BBC looks at some of the energy numbers as the UK government pursues its net zero obsession. One obvious and increasing problem is the erratic deficiency of wind and solar power at various times in every 24-hour period, requiring either massive, expensive energy storage capacity or acceptance of power gaps once gas power stations are removed from the system, or most likely both. Complaining about expensive gas, only to propose something yet more costly which doesn’t even generate its own power, lacks economic or any other sense. Nuclear is jogging along in the background but won’t be centre stage any time soon, if ever.
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The UK has committed to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050, says BBC News.

Net zero is the point at which the country is taking as much of these climate-changing gases out of the atmosphere as it is putting in.

As part of this promise, the government has a target to cut emissions by 78% by 2035, compared with 1990 levels.

Game over? “Global shift of energy system to renewables is not happening”

Lots of coal in Australia

Renewables struggle to even keep pace with the increase in demand. They may sound good to some, but in the energy mix overall the heavy lifting is still done by fuel burning. When reality bites, climate theories get pushed aside.
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The share of renewables in the global energy consumption has risen only minimally, according to a new report.
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The world’s energy transition to renewables is not happening, reports Energy Live News.

That’s one of the findings of the REN21’s Renewables 2022 Global Status report, which suggests the global shift to lower-carbon energy sources is not up to speed, making it unlikely that the world will be able to meet critical climate goals this decade.

Show us the money! Rich nations accused of ‘betrayal’ at Bonn climate talks

Crazy world of climate finance [image credit: renewableenergyfocus.com]

The wealthier (due largely to intensive use of coal, oil and gas) countries have worked out that paying any money that looks like ‘climate compensation’ would be seen as an open-ended admission of liability, leading to endless claims from those less fortunate.
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As key talks end, rich and poor countries are at loggerheads on the divisive issue of loss and damage, says BBC News.
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Poorer nations say rich ones have betrayed them by dragging their feet on paying for centuries of climate damage.

They were hoping to get compensation talks onto the official agenda for November’s COP27 climate conference.

But on the final day of climate talks in Bonn that is in doubt.

Is climate change causing this week’s hot UK weather? – asks Yahoo News

Warm day in London

In a word – no. One or two days of warm air blowing in from the continent to the southern half of the UK can’t prove anything. The forecast for Edinburgh, Scotland for example shows nothing over 20C in the next few days, so wailing about carbon dioxide and climate change is absurd. It shouldn’t need saying that weather isn’t going to be near seasonal norms all the time.
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By the end of this week, parts of Britain will bake in temperatures of up to 34C, far hotter than normal June weather – but is climate change behind the soaring temperatures? – asks Yahoo News.

Met Office deputy chief meteorologist Dan Rudman, said: “Temperatures will continue to rise as we go through the week, becoming well above-average by Friday when many parts of the southern half of the UK are likely to exceed 30C and may even reach 34C in some places.”

“This is the first spell of hot weather this year and it is unusual for temperature to exceed these values in June.”

India’s Coal Proliferation Contradicts Global Climate Drama

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The message from the world’s most populous hot country is clear: more coal please. Climate obsessives take note.

PA Pundits - International

By Vijay Raj Jayaraj~

We have a crisis in India, and it is not with the climate. Power plants for the world’s second largest consumer of coal are running out of stock, leaving a billion people at the risk of blackouts and forcing industries to close facilities.

To resolve the situation, the Indian government has authorized increased importation of thermal coal, removed all import duty on coal, is reopening hundreds of closed coal mines, and has asked existing domestic mines to produce at unprecedented rates. The country has even canceled dozens of commercial trains to make room for the freight trains that carry coal.

Coal-fired plants produce more than 70 percent of all electricity consumed by India’s 1.3 billion people. Indicating greater demand, coal-based electricity registered a 3.12 percent increase in March 2022 compared to a year ago.  Coal shortages can have a devastating effect on the Indian economy.

For the past…

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Clouds played an important role in the history of climate, say researchers

Cumuliform cloudscape over Swifts Creek, Australia
[image credit: Wikipedia]

Looking into the past and future of climatic conditions on computer models can give somewhat cloudy results, at least partly because “there’s considerable uncertainty about the simulation of clouds in global climate models”.
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Were Earth’s oceans completely covered by ice during the Cryogenian period, about 700 million years ago, or was there an ice-free belt of open water around the equator where sponges and other forms of life could survive?

Using global climate models, a team of researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Vienna has shown that a climate allowing a waterbelt is unlikely and thus cannot reliably explain the survival of life during the Cryogenian, says Phys.org.

The reason is the uncertain impact of clouds on the epoch’s climate.

Have climate models outlived their usefulness? – Net Zero Watch

Is more computing power just getting us the wrong results from overheated models faster?
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Outside of their academic fascination, looked at in terms of their contribution to climate policy, it seems that we may have reached the useful limit of computer climate modelling, says Dr. David Whitehouse.

The first computers built in the 1950s allowed climate scientists to think about modelling the climate using this new technology.

The first usable computer climate models were developed in the mid-1970s.

Shortly afterwards the US National Academy of Sciences used their outcomes to estimate a crucial climate parameter we still calculate today – the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) – how much the world would warm (from ‘pre-industrial’ levels) with a doubling of CO2 — and concluded that it had a range of 1.5 – 4.5°C.

BBC accused of institutional alarmism as new report reveals long list of climate misinformation

Looking the other way?

Serial offenders in climate reporting at the BBC get called out. Their own charter demands impartiality, but that got buried years ago on this topic at least, along with many of the subsequent complaints from the public.
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The report, compiled by climate researcher Paul Homewood, reveals that the BBC has been forced to correct a dozen false claims and other items of fake news in climate-related coverage after receiving public complaints in recent years, says Net Zero Watch.

The report, which has been submitted to the Government’s upcoming Mid-Term Review of the BBC, shows that it has become common practice for BBC reporters to publicise exaggerated and often misleading weather-and climate-related stories in order to hype up the potential risks from global warming.

Russian scientists claim global warming cannot be stopped without CO2 traps

CO2 is not pollution

They do at least discuss ‘the discrepancy between the constant increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the non-monotonic increase in global temperature’, which ought to be a strong hint that currently popular climate theories are not satisfactory. But is obsessing about 0.04% of the atmosphere, a large part of it naturally produced, ‘scientific’ anyway?
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Reducing the consumption of fossil fuels is not enough to prevent the world’s average annual temperature from rising by two or more degrees above pre-industrial levels, says Phys.org.

Russian scientists at NUST MISIS are convinced that global climate change cannot be stopped without the development of technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the air. The results of their study are presented in Thermal Engineering.

The anthropogenic factor is considered to be the main cause of climate change. The use of fossil fuels, agriculture and forestry are among the main drivers of global warming.

Renewable energy: Frustration over cost of trying to go green

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]

Massive hidden charges scupper a home heat pump plan. Meanwhile we’re fed tales of millions of UK heat pumps running on Moroccan solar power by 2030, in pursuit of ‘net zero’ climate targets as per government propaganda. Reality suggests otherwise.
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A County Down woman has said she is “overwhelmingly disappointed” that a connection charge of thousands of pounds has dashed her hopes of installing an environmentally-friendly air source heat pump at her new-build house, reports BBC News.

After a lifetime working in the environment sector, Celia Spouncer and her partner, David Thompson, wanted to build a home that was as efficient as possible and would allow them to be part of what Celia thought of as the green revolution.

“It’s driven into you, it’s all about air tightness in the build,” she said.

The State of the Climate 2021 – no evidence of crisis

But the usual cherrypicking of weather events, which proves nothing, will no doubt continue in attempts to blame humans.
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A systematic review of climate trends and observational data by an eminent climate scientist has found no evidence to support the claim of a climate crisis, says The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Ole Humlum: State of the Climate 2021 (pdf)

The State of the Climate 2021 – The Global Warming Policy Foundation

Tories to slash Met Office staff – ‘despite need to track climate change’

Why ‘track climate change’? We all know ‘tracking’ means using climate models to conjure up attribution numbers that can’t be questioned, except possibly by other climate models. How useful is that?
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The Met Office will be reduced to its smallest size since the Second World War (says London Economic) if it is hit by a 20 per cent Civil Service staff cut, new figures have revealed.

Ministers have ordered every government department and agency to draw up plans to reduce their plans by at least one fifth, it has emerged.

According to the i newspaper, officials must also explain how they could cut staff numbers by up to 40 per cent if required.

Met backlash

The Met Office is expected to lobby ministers to preserve its current workforce, arguing that its role has never been more vital because of the need to forecast climate change.

It will also claim that its work pays for itself – because it is able to sell its services to commercial clients.

If the Met Office’s current workforce of just under 2,000 is slashed by 20 per cent, it will go below 1,600.

Full article here.

A cloudless future? The mystery at the heart of climate forecasts

Cloud guesswork is hindering climate models, therefore relying heavily on their outputs to decide policies must be risky. A professor commented that we may “need a Manhattan Project level of new federal funding and interagency coordination to actually solve this problem.” This can’t be brushed aside as a minor issue.
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We hear a lot about how climate change will change the land, sea, and ice says Eurekalert.

But how will it affect clouds?

“Low clouds could dry up and shrink like the ice sheets,” says Michael Pritchard, professor of Earth System science at UC Irvine. “Or they could thicken and become more reflective.”

These two scenarios would result in very different future climates. And that, Pritchard says, is part of the problem.

Why did Mars dry out? Carbon dioxide loss not a factor, say scientists

Mars from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope

The hunt is now on for the offending ‘missing ingredient’: “Carbon dioxide is a strong greenhouse gas, so it really was the leading candidate to explain the drying out of Mars,” said Kite, an expert on the climates of other worlds. “But these results suggest it’s not so simple.” The article calls this ‘unusual’, but is what it considers usual really so?
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Mars once ran red with rivers, says Phys.org.

The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet.

But about three billion years ago, they all dried up—and no one knows why.

“People have put forward different ideas, but we’re not sure what caused the climate to change so dramatically,” said University of Chicago geophysical scientist Edwin Kite. “We’d really like to understand, especially because it’s the only planet we definitely know changed from habitable to uninhabitable.”

Weather’s unwanted guest: Nasty La Niña keeps popping up, confounding climate modellers

When observations show modellers ‘the opposite of what their best computer model simulations say should be happening with human-caused climate change’, it’s surely time to revisit their assumptions. Meanwhile, much head-scratching.
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Something weird is up with La Nina, the natural but potent weather event linked to more drought and wildfires in the western United States and more Atlantic hurricanes, says Phys.org.

It’s becoming the nation’s unwanted weather guest and meteorologists said the West’s megadrought won’t go away until La Nina does.

The current double-dip La Nina set a record for strength last month and is forecast to likely be around for a rare but not quite unprecedented third straight winter. And it’s not just this one.

Climate change effect on Peruvian glaciers debated in German court

Bumpy road ahead?[image credit: RWE]

Possibly the longest running climate ‘lawfare’ case ever. Sometimes the duration of a case is itself a large part of the desired effect, whatever the outcome. Lawyers win as usual.
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German judges and experts have arrived at the edge of a melting glacier high up in the Peruvian Andes to examine a complaint made by a local farmer who accuses energy giant RWE of threatening his home by contributing to global warming, says Digital Journal.

The visit by the nine-member delegation to the region is the latest stage in a case the plaintiffs hope will set a new worldwide precedent.

Leading the demand for “climate justice” is 41-year-old Peruvian farmer Saul Luciano Lliuya, who lives in the mountains close to the city of Huaraz.

He has filed suit against the German firm RWE, saying its greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for the melting of nearby glaciers.