Battle of the skies as airlines fight over impact of contrails on the climate

This report summary says ‘Vapour trails conundrum resurfaces’. Cloud formation plays an uncertain part in the debate, for example. An experiment using AI found that real time route selection could play a part in reducing the supposed ’emissions’ problem. Proposed financial penalties for airlines are inevitably resisted, but they’re up against net zero climate obsession.
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Airlines are usually rather good at presenting a united face to the world, particularly when it comes to lobbying global policymakers, says The Telegraph.

But a recent move by the EU to clampdown on so-called contrails, the vapour that spews from an aircraft’s jet engines in a thin cloud-like formation, has set carriers at each other’s throats.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata), which counts most of the world’s flag-carriers among its members, has lobbied Brussels to limit the mandatory monitoring of contrails to only flights within the bloc, in an effort to ease the burden of data collection.

But it has stoked the ire of low-cost operators including EasyJet and Ryanair.

Is Net Zero a poisoned chalice for governments?

The American title of the article here is ‘Europeans Ditch Net Zero, While Biden Clings To It’. Maybe an exaggeration as nobody has tried to ditch it entirely, even if some policy targets have been watered down, re-scheduled or even dropped (possibly). But the unreality of it all is at least beginning to make itself felt, as governments try desperately to pretend it’s all a great idea that just needs a few tweaks here and there, while ever more of their citizens feel the pain of it all.
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You know you’ve stumbled through the looking glass when European politicians start sounding saner on climate policy than Americans do, says the Wall Street Journal (via Climate Change Dispatch.

Well here we are, Alice: Europeans are admitting the folly of net zero quicker than their American peers.

The latest example—perhaps “victim” is more apt—is Humza Yousaf, who resigned this week as Scotland’s first minister.

That region within the U.K. enjoys substantial devolved powers over its own affairs, including on climate policy.

UK Government defeated in High Court over climate plans – as usual

Time for yet another revised ‘net zero emissions’ plan. Whether any country that used to depend largely on fuel-burning power stations for electricity can meet the demands of its own time-limited climate plans/targets is open to question. The BBC report once again wheels out the old climate propaganda con trick of pretending that sunset shadow effects are scary pollution clouds in its report image.
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The government has been defeated in court – for a second time – for not doing enough to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, reports BBC News.

Environmental campaigners argued that the energy minister signed off the government’s climate plan without evidence it could be achieved.

The High Court ruled on Friday that the government will now be required to redraft the plan again.

In response the government defended its record on climate action.

Research quantifies ‘gap’ in CO2 removal – a climate target with no viable plans?

Having been told by the UN-IPCC that nature’s own carbon cycle isn’t up to the job any more, the manufactured problem for climate-obsessed governments seems to be the lack of any ‘carbon removal’ method that is (a) affordable and (b) effective, in terms of the scale of the supposed need. Such is the strange world of climate policy today.
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New research involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggests that countries’ current plans to remove CO2 from the atmosphere will not be enough to comply with the 1.5ºC warming limit set out under the Paris Agreement, says Phys.org.

Since 2010, the United Nations environmental organization UNEP has taken an annual measurement of the emissions gap—the difference between countries’ climate protection pledges and what is necessary to limit global heating to 1.5ºC, or at least below 2ºC [Talkshop comment – according to unproven IPCC climate theories].

The UNEP Emissions Gap Reports are clear: climate policy needs more ambition. This new study now explicitly applies this analytical concept to carbon dioxide removal (CDR)—the removal of the most important greenhouse gas, CO2, from the atmosphere.

Britain must spend £30bn to strip CO2 from atmosphere and hit net zero, experts warn

This ‘essential’ expense would likely go the way of HS2 and double or triple in real cost, with at least some costs continuing well after the target date. Absurd is too weak a word to describe this fear of a harmless trace gas essential to nature. CO2 is not pollution.
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Britain must invest [sic] £30bn in a network of massive air cleansing systems designed to strip CO2 from the atmosphere if it is to reach net zero, a government-funded report has warned.

The “direct air carbon capture systems” would remove up to 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year and then pump it into disused oil and gas reservoirs under the North Sea or Irish Sea, says The Telegraph.

Without such a scheme the UK will never reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050, according to the report by Energy Systems Catapult, a government-funded body that promotes innovation.

Net zero CO2 emissions: A damaging and totally unnecessary goal – Roy Spencer explains why

We may not believe CO2 plays a big part in global atmospherics anyway, but even if it somehow does, the full story is not being told according to this information. Quote: ‘Even though the CO2 emissions continue, atmospheric CO2 levels start to fall around 2060.’
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The goal of reaching “net zero” global anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide sounds overwhelmingly difficult.

But that’s not true, because nature doesn’t work that way, says Dr.Roy Spencer (via Climate Change Dispatch).

While humanity continues producing CO2 at increasing rates (with a temporary pause during COVID), how can we ever reach the point where these emissions start to fall, let alone reach zero by 2050 or 2060?

What isn’t being discussed (as far as I can tell) is the fact that atmospheric CO2 levels (which we will assume for the sake of discussion causes global warming) will start to fall even while humanity is producing lots of CO2.

Climate policy fiasco: Scot Nats mocked for replacing flagship green target with ‘accelerated’ plan

Humza Yousaf is just another in a long list of politicians in various countries forced to backtrack on extravagant and disruptive so-called climate change plans. Attempts to reinvent their national electricity systems, along with numerous other energy-related interventions like mandatory electric car target dates, are proving a lot tougher to achieve than imagined when breezily announced. They all ignore the fact that nature relies on carbon dioxide to survive and grow. To paraphrase Groucho Marx: “If you don’t like our climate targets, we have others.”
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Humza Yousaf and his Green coalition partners have been mocked after insisting they were pursuing an “accelerated response to the climate emergency” by abandoning a flagship greenhouse gas target, says The Telegraph.

The First Minister admitted that his government was scrapping Nicola Sturgeon’s promise to cut Scotland’s carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2030 after experts warned it was unachievable.

He said it would be replaced by “an accelerated climate change proposal and plan”, including a controversial measure to impose a new carbon tax on large country estates.

Anas Sarwar, the Scottish Labour leader, said during First Minister’s Questions: “Only Humza Yousaf could believe that slamming on the brakes – because that is exactly what the SNP is doing this afternoon – is an acceleration.”

Swiss climate policy – a case of failing to do the impossible?

Phrases like ‘action against climate change’ and ‘climate protection’ are uttered without any clear idea of what, if anything, they might mean. Natural variation at all timescales is an ongoing process, but difficult to measure or predict with any accuracy. Warming has followed the lengthy Little Ice Age, but now some countries – even those with glaciers and ‘snow-capped’ peaks like Switzerland – are being saddled with a legal obligation to attempt to put the brakes on that, by swallowing the argument that a trace gas in the atmosphere is the main source of a supposedly solvable problem of slightly rising temperatures.
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Switzerland, known for pristine countryside and snow-capped [sic] peaks, is facing scrutiny of its environmental policies after becoming the first country faulted by an international court for failing to do enough against climate change, says Phys.org.

The European Court of Human Rights’s ruling last week highlighted a number of failings in Swiss policies, but experts stressed that the wealthy Alpine country was not necessarily doing much worse than its peers.

“The judgment made it really clear that there are critical gaps in the Swiss domestic regulatory framework,” said Tiffanie Chan, a policy analyst at the London School of Economics and Political Science specializing in climate change laws.

“But it’s definitely not a Switzerland-only case,” she told AFP.

Net zero mania update: German transport minister warns of weekend driving ban

Unsurprisingly he gets accused of ‘scaremongering through absurd proposals’. But isn’t the real issue a blind insistence on the unworkable ideology of so-called climate policy that lies behind the proposals? Muttering about pollution is just a means of confusing people into accepting the argument that CO2 is a problem.
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Germany’s transport minister has warned that driving will have to be banned at the weekends unless the country’s net zero laws are changed, says The Telegraph.

Volker Wissing’s FDP party wants the law amended so the polluting transport sector can miss carbon emissions reduction targets, as long as Germany as a whole reaches them. [Talkshop comment – carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant].

But the change is opposed by the Greens, who are part of the three-way coalition with the pro-business FDP and the Social Democrats (SPD), led by Olaf Scholz, the chancellor.

Negotiations over the law have dragged on since September last year.

European court rules human rights violated by ‘climate inaction’

A victory for cloud cuckoo land thinking. The court has in effect granted a disputed hypothesis the status of truth, based on its assumption that ’emissions’ are driving changes in the climate. Once courts can pick sides in scientific debates, where does that lead?
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A group of older Swiss women have won the first ever climate case victory in the European Court of Human Rights, reports BBC News.

The women, mostly in their 70s, said that their age and gender made them particularly vulnerable to the effects of heatwaves linked to climate change.

The court said Switzerland’s efforts to meet its emission reduction targets had been woefully inadequate.

It is the first time the powerful court has ruled on global warming.

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.

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.

France’s Economy Minister slams EU’s ‘no longer wanted’ renewable targets

So-called climate targets are once more proving to be a recipe for trouble wherever they appear. With a large nuclear fleet for its electricity generation, France is calling EU demands “the Europe we no longer want” and ignoring its directives, incurring the wagging finger of warning from Brussels.
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The EU’s renewable energy targets adopted in March last year are too restrictive and unsatisfactory as climate goals, French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire, who took over the Energy portfolio in a recent government reshuffle, said on Monday (4 March).

Despite repeated requests from the European Commission, France remains opposed to the calculation method used by Brussels to set targets for the use of renewable energy, says Euractiv.

“The targets can no longer be to have so many windmills here, so many photovoltaic panels here,” Le Maire said on Monday, criticising “the Europe we no longer want”.

Why atmospheric geoengineering is dead in the water

Another idea for slaying imaginary climate dragons runs into trouble, as new research finds ‘an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale’. So for believers in a climate crisis the desired short-term effectiveness just isn’t there.
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Climate change is heating the oceans, altering currents and circulation patterns responsible for regulating climate on a global scale [Talkshop comment – empty assertions]. If temperatures dropped, some of that damage could theoretically [sic] be undone.

But employing “emergency” atmospheric geoengineering later this century in the face of continuous high carbon emissions would not be able to reverse changes to ocean currents, a new study finds.

This would critically curtail the intervention’s potential effectiveness on human-relevant timescales.

Oceans, especially the deep oceans, absorb and lose heat more slowly than the atmosphere, so an intervention that cools the air would not be able to cool the deep ocean on the same timescale, the authors found.

Government climate techno-fixes raise ‘grave doubts’ among UK’s civil servants

Net zero policies and plans of climate-obsessed politicians looking threadbare and unrealistic yet again, this time in court. They can never admit that their goals are unachievable at any price, even supposing their methods had some merit.
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British civil servants have grave doubts about their government’s favoured techno-fixes for climate-polluting industries like meat production and air travel, new documents show.

In risk assessments made public because of an ongoing court case, officials warned that technology to reduce methane emissions from cow burps is “nascent” and there might not be enough plants or hydrogen available to power the world’s planes more sustainably, says Climate Home News.

Yet despite the uncertainties surrounding these and other climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal, the UK government is relying on such technologies to meet a big chunk of its climate plans.

World’s first year-long breach of ‘key’ 1.5C warming limit alarms the BBC

Alarmists mark an artificial deadline, still pretending government-driven limits can be put on long-term climate variations and attempting to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, which hasn’t happened anyway. Cue the usual well-worn phrases about tackling climate change, emissions etc.
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For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU’s climate service.

World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts, says BBC News.

This first year-long breach doesn’t break that landmark “Paris agreement”, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

UN bidding starts in the $trillions for COP 29 climate finance

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

A UN official claims there’s a ‘need to collectively raise and direct $2.4 trillion annually for climate mitigation’. Billions are too small to mention any more, when trying to ‘avoid devastating impacts of climate change’ (says this article). Since climate models aren’t even much good at replicating reality, and various dire predictions to date have failed, what basis is there for this proposed level of spending?
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The UN’s next climate summit will be an “enabling COP,” focused on drastically scaling up climate finance and making bold emissions reduction commitments, says Axios.

Why it matters: Top UN climate official Simon Stiell delivered a speech this morning in Baku, Azerbaijan, envisioning what will happen if the world meets the climate challenge and avoids devastating impacts of climate change.

Zoom in: The speech, delivered at ADA University, counters perceptions in some parts of the climate community that Baku will involve lower stakes and more technical work than COP28 did in Dubai.

New study reports that Greenland is a methane sink rather than a source

Greenland settlement [image credit: climatechangepost.com]

A large dent goes in to thawing permafrost scares, as another ‘ticking time bomb’ based on greenhouse gas theories turns out to be a dud. As for carbon dioxide, the professor leading the study commented: “…the ice-free parts of Greenland have only been without ice since the last ice age, meaning that they never stored much carbon”. Climate models will have to be revised.
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Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have concluded that the methane uptake in dry landscapes exceeds methane emissions from wet areas across the ice-free part of Greenland.

The results of the new study contribute important knowledge to climate models, says Phys.org.

The researchers are now investigating whether the same finding applies to other polar regions.

French farmers express net zero nausea as ‘siege of Paris’ begins

The tractors are out in force. Wrestling with onerous climate regulations, squeezed by supermarkets and pressured to give up land, many farmers have had more than enough, and not only in France.
Update: Farmergeddon! – (Daily Mail)
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Why the farmers don’t like the EU’s environmental policies – BBC News.

At the heart of the European Green Deal, which sets out how to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, is a scheme called the Farm to Fork Strategy.

The approach aims to:

— Halve pesticide use by 2030
— Reduce fertiliser use
— Devote at least 10% of agricultural areas to non-agricultural uses (for example by turning it into fallow land, planting non-productive trees or creating ponds)
— Ensure 25% of the total EU agricultural land is used for organic farming
by 2030

These targets are seen by many farmers as unrealistic and expensive.

The Green Deal itself also includes legislation aimed at reducing emissions.

Agriculture accounts for around 11% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions, so farmers will be very affected by efforts to reduce emissions.

Already in 2019, protests erupted in the Netherlands over proposals to dramatically reduce livestock farming in order to lower emissions.
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‘Just impossible’ to be a farmer in France

There’s a line of tractors behind me which is blocking one of the main motorways into Paris, near Charles de Gaulle airport.

We were driving along with one man who is here with his son-in-law, who has been driving a tractor. His son-in-law has a horse stables not too far from here.

He says things are just impossible for farmers here in France, and that it’s very hard for them to compete with other countries in the European Union, which he says have lower standards.

On top of that, he was complaining about the low cost of food being sold and the challenge that the green agenda is posing for production.

Full report here.

Send more funds: Earth system models are missing key piece of future climate puzzle, researchers say

Alaskan permafrost: [image credit: insideclimatenews.org]

The ’emissions’ obsessives of climate research seek greater financing for the endless quest for evidence that might support their theories. The subject here is permafrost, but it also reads like an admission that climate is more complicated than current models can cope with, for a number of reasons.
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The way science is funded is hampering Earth system models, and may be skewing important climate predictions, according to a new comment published in Nature Climate Change by Woodwell Climate Research Center and an international team of model experts, says Phys.org.

Emissions from thawing permafrost, frozen ground in the North that contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere does and is thawing due to human-caused climate warming [Talkshop comment – the usual empty assertion], are one of the largest uncertainties in future climate projections.

But accurate representation of permafrost dynamics is missing from the major models that project future carbon emissions.